When I heard the news a couple of years ago that Iran’s president Mahmud Ahmadinejad was going to ban western classical music, I immediately wondered, ‘Now how can classical music be prisonous to his eastern values? I know we in the west can have plenty of poison like anyway else, but this was a little ridiculous. I have seen photos of Iran and I also love the movies of Majid Majidi. Both show that the country and the people are beautiful, but not the politics. It is not beautiful. But when has politics ever been beautiful? Bothersome maybe, but not beautiful.
Anyway, when I was a university student back in the Stone Age, I had to take music appreciation which was mainly classical music with topics and pieces by the greats like Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven, and lesser known fathers of classical music like Claudio Monteverdi. Because of this class I began to explore classical music on my own. I would go to the public library and check out entire operas and listen to them while I did my homework. How I manage to concentrate with the music playing loudly is a wonder to me now.
I went on to purchase many cassettes and records. One of my favorite purchases was called Romances for Saxophone with the sax played by Branford Marsalis, the brother of Wynton. I still have the cassette. It has pieces by composers like Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, and Stravinsky.
A favorite classical piece of mine is from the French composer Jules Massenet’s opera Thais. It is called Meditation.
The standard version can be listened to in this lovely video.
An updated version by the Japanese violinist Iwao Furusawa can be heard here.
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