Being the glorious rabbit hole that this wider hobby is, what is your favourite rabbit hole
within the rabbit hole? Mine is not based on the gear itself but on music, and I'll share it with you just to underscore that what really connects us as a group is the passion for
something.
As some of you know I'm an avid classical music lover (among a few dozen other genres
), and while I have a very wide interest in period music starting from the end of the Middle Ages / early renaissance to 21st century compositions, I had never looked into style development of any individual composer. Wanting to know what was in a composer's mind and how this developed over time depending on what happened in life I decided to focus on
Gustav Mahler; an Austrian composer who played a significant role at the end of the so called Romantic period and together with some fellow composers paved the way for modern classical music. Think 1880-1910.
I decided to listen to his 16 official compositions in chronological order and to add one more rabbit hole worthy layer: Trying to find the (for me!) best performance (recording) of each of these compositions. This means dealing with completely different insights from each and every conductor, the quality of the individual players, the magic of synergy, et cetera.
Example: I'm currently "reviewing" Mahler's 8th symphony (his generally least liked) of which I have collected 12 different recordings (based on the best performances according to dozens of classical music critics), ranging from the 1950s to the 2020s. You can imagine that over 7 decades time the interpretation of how a musical piece "should" be played changes bit by bit, as the artistic freedom of interpretation of a conductor has become equally important to what the composer wrote on paper.
I listen to these 12 recordings twice (it's an 80 minute piece...) after which the potential winner(s) will slowly emerge. In this particular case 4 of those recordings have survived the others; mostly based on musical engagement, tempi, and individual "craftmanship" of the musicians. Note that the quality of the recording is not playing any role for me, and I can well end up picking a dramatically bad live mono recording with a lot of coughing as the winner over a fantastic digital and perfectly clean close-miked recording. So in my case it's really about the musical interpretation and goose bumps.
With these 4 potential winners I will do round 3, 4, and if necessary 5 or even more. Sometimes more recordings deserve the #1 spot for me because they're equally fantastic in their own right but in a very different regard, or they're so
completely different that they deserve to be played next to each other (for instance, some works exist in a version for large orchestra but also in a version for solo piano). So I will probably play this work, say, 32 times over a month's time before I move on to his next work. I started my Mahler project in February 2023 and will probably conclude it this August. Let's say it's about 10 compositions * on average 10 recordings * on average 3,5 plays = 525 Mahler works in 18 months (=540 days). So, yeah, basically 1 hour of Mahler per day during 1,5 years. A rabbit hole if there ever was one.
Your turn!
drftr
