>>55333258
What’s striking about this list is how amazingly conservative it is. There is nothing earlier than Bach, and nothing later than Bartok. Everything on it could be programmed by the least ambitious director of the least adventurous provincial symphony orchestra, with no fear that subscribers would be frightened away. (If that Vivaldi looks unfamiliar to you, he means the Four Seasons — he’s just using the title of the larger set to which they belong to make himself look like he knows about classical music.)
Scaruffi professes to despise the Beatles for being ‘mainstream’, but this list is mainstream with a vengeance: no Gesualdo, no Schoenberg, no Webern, no Stockhausen, no Babbitt, no Ligeti; but more interestingly, not a single Bach cantata, when the general consensus these days is that Bach’s cantatas are far more central to his achievement and career than something like the Brandenburgs, which, great as they are, are nowadays most often heard as pre-flight music on Ryanair planes. Only one work by Mozart, and that not an opera; nothing by Haydn, Sibelius, Handel, Palestrina, Gabrieli, Victoria, Tallis, Byrd or anyone else from before the 17th century; no Britten, no Berg, no Henze, no Birtwistle, no Partch, Cage, Feldman or even Glass or Reich.