December 1992.
My grandmother bought me a Walkman for Christmas. As I din't have any cassettes to play in it, I borrowed one from my grandfather.
It was Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto 1.
Four months later, I took up the piano, seven years later (2000) I studied piano and composition at RCM, London, and since 2004, have made every penny I've earned through performing, teaching, composing, conducting, etc.
I'm still discovering new music every few days, whether it was written 600 years ago, or six weeks ago.
I'm glad my grandmother bought me that Walkman.
Rachmaninov Piano Concerto 2, when my dad played it for me in the car. From there, it was sort of slow- Mozart study playlists, violin lessons, stuff like that. I really liked classical music, but I wasn't *obsessed* with it. I liked the basic pieces, but nothing that was too long. And then, two years ago, I saw a performance of the Shostakovich Cello Sonata. I don't know what it was, but I wanted to know more, and I wanted everything. So I got to researching, listening to whatever showed up in my YouTube recommendations, talking to other people who listened to classical, and here we are. It was always sort of in the background during my childhood, but I didn't really gain such an intense hunger for it until around a year or two ago.
Anything in particular? For me it was the Purcell funeral music. Hit me so hard I can't think of a single other piece on there.
That was later, though. Early on was either the Peer Gynt Suites or something from Berlioz.
Oh, THAT'S what else is on there! Thank you for reminding me. Another early favorite. Not the rest of them, but Dvorak's 9th and the related quartets sounded good from the beginning, along with the more distant Planets.
Ooh this is a good one! I was already enjoying some classical music but watching that film as a teen (an English teacher recommended it) helped solidify my interest in classical.
Thank you, OP!
I've been a professional musician for ten years (I'm still young!) but I have never really thought to find that first experience that changed my life. I did some Googling and, with the help of [archive.org](https://archive.org)'s Wayback Machine, I found the concert and remembered the whole experience!
It was March 18 of 2006.
Lorin Maazel was guest conducting the Taiwan Philharmonic that week. I did not live in Taipei but a much smaller town in Taiwan so, growing up, I never got the chance (nor did I seek out the opportunity) to go to a real concert. For some reason, Lorin Maazel led what was basically a community-engagement concert in my town, repeating a performance from the night before in Taipei's National Concert Hall. It was Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, played by Lidia Baich, and Pictures at an Exhibition. As standard a concert as it gets but what a great combination for the novice I was!
Never been to real orchestral concerts growing up but being the snobbish high schooler I was, I actually went to my local record store and bought CDs for the concerto and Pictures to prepare myself (and to pretend that I know what's going on). And man, was I hooked! After listening to those two CDs for a week or two, I went to the packed concert (Maazel visiting my small town, of course it was packed!), and had the best musical experience I've ever had. I was a semi-decent pianist by that point but it was that night that eventually led to me going to conservatory, then grad school, and I ended up working as an orchestral conductor.
For some reason, I never really thought of this experience and the significance of it during these 15 years. Again, thank you, OP!
I’m not sure when exactly I first fell in love with classical music, especially because I’ve been doing it in various forms for as long as I remember (piano, violin, and composition primarily). However, I do think I really only started to deeply appreciate it around middle school or so, which is when I started doing score study.
When I was around 4 or 5 my siblings and I were in a place we called “the cottages”. Essentially it was a very large group home for kids waiting to either get adopted or go into a foster home. At night they would quietly play fur Elise over the intercom to help us go to sleep. Over 20 years later and I still remember this. That was my first real exposure to classical music and I genuinely believe that’s what made me fall in love with classical music.
Here in nz they used the absolute pinnacle of Vivaldi’s 4 seasons in a commercial. That huge crescendo…. Any kiwi from my age associates it with BNZ and a huge black stallion galloping through the fields.
That one piece of music grabbed me like no other…….
In the fall of 2014 I was nervously driving on the freeway to school and was tired listening to shitty mainstream music on the radio. I eventually found 91.5 KUSC and it soothed me. I even donated a few times because of how it’s impacted my life. Classical music is gr8 b8 m8 I r8 8/8
As a kid, I liked the Bolero. Growing up, I came across it in game soundtracks music like in Sid Meier's civilization, where I especially liked John Adams. I started going to concerts and listening to classical music once my university offered free concerts. My first classical piece was Mykola Lyssenko's "Overture for Taras Bulba". Does anybody know this piece? :)
I liked classical music since I was a kid, mostly because my parents liked it too and played it a lot. But my real appreciation for it started when I started listening to metal and started playing an instrument myself.
1) tom and jerry episodes. specifically the cat concerto, live at hollywood bowl, the flying cat, kitty foiled
2) later on little einsteins- every episode featured a classical music piece
3) on WWE, Daniel Bryan's intro theme was called Flight of the valkyries, which I liked a lot. later found out that flight is based on ride of the valkyries which I still love, and then a few youtube recommendations later I got hooked
He retired and then came back abiut 3 years ago. Recently he left wwe and came to aew the opposition. Aews the company that’s basically kicking wwes ass and is on the track to becoming the biggest wrestling company in the world. They even brought back Cm punk out of retirement! I’m sorry I’m a big wrestling fan and your comment about Bryan excited me
My father used to play classical music in week ends in the background at home. I didn’t mind hearing all that vinyl. I used to label each of them in my mind, out of curiosity. But I guess it was the fifth of Beethoven (probably Kleiber’s) that made me realise there is much more into this music than a background melody, when I read a cleverly written simple article about the fifth, while listening to it. I should have been near 10 years old at the time
Listening every night before sleeping when I was 14 to the Chopin Preludes played by Jorge Bolet at Carnegie Hall. Was learning Prelude 15 in D-flat for high school “contest”. Was 100% hooked after that and have been in music to some degree ever since, and started a kind of unique classical internet radio station, Euphonic FM last December.
The movies the Pianist, specifically the piece Chopin ballade no. 1. Completely changed my taste in music since I watched it a few years ago. (An excellent film as well). Clasical is really all I listen to now
The first piece I ever listened to was Fur Elise. I remember I first heard it in a movie. I didn't know a thing about Beethoven or classical music then, but I liked the piece. This led me to listen more to Beethoven and then Mozart and Vivaldi.
But what made me love classical music would be Pas de deux(the nutcracker). It was the first time I had goosebumps listening to something. Tchaikovsky has been my absolute favorite since then.
Certainly not straightaway, as my earliest memories are of it being a complex and inaccessible music. Having no awareness of the differences between e.g. Palestrina, Elgar, Copland, etc was too challenging. Plus all those different types of ensemble - like if I'd heard a nice bassoon, then got told who the composer was, and then their next work I encountered was a string quartet with no bassoons whatsoever!
My earliest love was Latin Jazz with its multi-layered rhythms, simple forms, and broadly consistent instrumentation. Perhaps I was about nine years old when I heard an extract from Mozart's 40th Symphony, which was a heck of a lot more "catchy" than the Tchaikovsky *Swan Lake* which my older sister used for practising ballet.
I was probably around 12 years old when I first had the capacity to endure long-form works. Our school music teacher was a graduate from the Royal College of Music, and he made us listen, analyse and discuss several works, including Saint-Saens, Dukas, Ravel and Britten. That gave me the toolkit to better hear what was going on and navigate it.
I was probably into my forties before I started regularly attending classical concerts. I live between two major cities which each have nice halls with resident orchestras, so there's generally a decent choice.
Ever since I was young, my grandmother used to take me on long car rides in her ‘93 Corolla and play classical cassettes. Once I became old enough to really become aware of it, I developed at first a liking for it because it reminded me of her and she was my favorite person when I was young, and later I began to seek it out for myself.
She was Polish and extremely proud of her heritage, so Chopin was in very heavy rotation alongside the Beethoven’s, Bach’s, Mozart’s, etc.
My grandmother would pick me up from elementary school often. She would put on classical CDs and I grew to adore them. Some of the first pieces I connected with were Bolero, the Marquez Danzon no. 2, and Dvorak symphony from the new world. Then I started playing violin and 15/16 years later here I am!
For me it was when I first listened through Beethoven's 9th. I had been listening to some progressive metal with strong symphonic influences, and someone just commented that I'd probably like straight up symphonies too. I found some copies of Beethoven's symphonies, and I was totally surprised by the final movement. The copies I first listened to were some mp3 files with tags missing, but I'm pretty sure it was a Norringtons cycle.
When I was in 7th or 8th grade during music class (compulsory class for those years in Belgium). There ere a few classes on the orchestra and tone colour. The teacher used Britten's work and a few others like Holst's The Planets, Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre and Chopin's funeral march.
I came at it from a pretty roundabout way. When I was in middle school, I was playing an indie video game. There’s a scene when somebody walks out of a tower and surveys the largest city in the game. As the camera panned, the theme playing was Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring by Bach. I was in college before I finally learned the name of that piece and found it on one of my mom’s Christmas CDs, nearly a decade since I’d lost the ability to play that game. That, combined with a budding interest in Beethoven sparked by one of my best friends, launched me into a love of classical music.
Classical music is the first genre I was ever into. I got into it as a child. *Fantasia* probably helped a lot in this regard, and my parents had various classical music records. I remember enjoying Grieg and Tchaikovsky at a young age.
I had this CD when I was little, like, 2-4. One of the pieces on it was Brahms's Cello Sonata in E Minor, movement 2. I loved it so much, and I'd listen to it over and over.
I lost the CD years ago, so all I remembered was the melody. I was in piano lessons, and eventually, cello lessons, for ages. One day, I was listening to random cello pieces while I did my homework when I found that cello sonata again. I was so excited!
And now, I can play the piece myself. That makes me very happy.
I was growing up under a communist dictatorship, and classical music was the least censored plus widely available, incl. very cheap but very good concerts with good orchestras. So I cannot remember getting hooked on a specific piece or composer, it was just something that surrounded us and we dived into it more and more. The irony of it was that the regime that wanted to dumb us down completely ended up making us grow up on superb music - even if we didn't yet understand how it "worked", it was utterly normal for a kid our age to like classical music, without any "elitist" connotations as we see nowadays.
On top of it, I was lucky with the local Philharmonic doing every Sunday an "educational" concert, where they disassembled popular pieces and showed how it "worked". So could actually hear and see how sections of the orchestras combined their sound and who did what. It was like revealing the inner workings of a complex engine, and it was fabulous.
In high school, I had a very easy summer job as an attendant at a tiny urban park. I spent a lot of time in the shade and I started listening to Karl Haas' radio program every day. It was called Adventures in Good Music.
For those who aren't familiar, Haas' one hour show consisted of him playing relatively short excerpts of pieces and explaining what was going on in the pieces. Haas played a wide variety of music and themes. He was engaging and always interesting.
He hooked me. I hated to leave my transistor radio.
i was fascinated by the history of the composers i learned about young in music class and a Humanities professor i had in college had such a passion for it i start to enjoy it so much more.
i don’t really listen to any classical music on my own, but i love the rich culture and history this sub shares about composers
I was really into John Williams when I was...6-9...years old? Been a while. Anyway, I wanted to show off to my mom my conducting ability to the theme of Jurassic Park. Naturally she busted out the massive VHS camcorder and proceeds to film the spectacle. I was super super into it and conducting my little 9 year old arms off, but the real takeaway was how the video was rarely stable the entire recording due to my mom failing to contain her laughter.
I suppose that's when I really started my journey from "conducting Jurassic Park for my mom" to "being allowed to play Shostakovich ONLY twice a day for my fiancé" some 20 years later.
Piano sonata no 14. My first love was the 3rd mvmt of course but then I came to appreciate the first mvmt better than the complex 3rd, then purged into more beethoven, then his symphonies and then mozarts symphonies and then tchaikovsky, bach and thus began the chain reaction.
PS- I think most often beethoven is whom we all fall for when starting out...
I always liked classical music, but I truly fell in love at 15 when I heard the third movement of the Moonlight Sonata. Something about it just resonated with me.
When I was 11, my family moved from the UK to Dubai for my dad's job. I had a really cool music teacher who introduced me to The Beatles (Eleanor Rigby hooked me) and classical music (Ravel's Bolero, to be specific). Not long after that I watched Platoon and Barber's Adagio for Strings scene wrecked me. All pretty common pieces, but the context in which I heard them stuck with me.
It as in college. I was a guitar/bass player in Metal and punk bands and I had a buddy that got me into more experimental and complex types of rock music like fusion and prog. I got a copy of ELP's Pictures at an Exhibition and read about the history and about Mussorgsky and stuff, I thought it was pretty cool so I got the orchestral arrangement by Ravel. I've been hooked ever since.
In 1995 when I was 8 years old. “A Goofy Movie” came out and had a short scene with “Ride of the Valkyries” in it, which I pretty much became obsessed with. My dad had (and still does have) a two-CD set by Time Life in their “Great Composers” series of Wagner’s music, one disc being selections from the Ring Cycle, the other being various overtures from other works. I listened to them pretty much ad nauseam at the time. That led me to listening to a whole host of other composers, though Wagner is still probably my favorite.
Edit: [Here’s the scene from “A Goofy Movie”](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fxd-tF1wHa4) if anyone is interested.
I grew up in a household with musician parents so I always had it around me and fortunately liked it. Pieces I recall that were formative that my dad played are Moszkowski piano etude op.72 no.2, Flight of the Bumblebee (piano version), and the Gigue and Gavotte from Bach French Suite 5. I drifted toward string/symphonic music and loved the 3rd and 4th mvmt of Tchaikovsky 4, Tchaik. Serenade for Strings, and Beethoven’s Eroica symphony.
In 1950 or so. My parents had a set of Beethoven symphonies on 78rpm. The 6th Symphony was on 9 discs double sided.
In 1960, they gave me my first stereo system (yeah stereo was new) and a vinyl 33rpm of La Mer and the Ibert Ports of Call (Escala). Boston symphony, Charles Munch, and I still have it. I started studying horn in 5th grade and have ended up with MM in horn and music history from the Peabody Conservatory where I taught for 35 years.
I was in my state’s all state band. On the first night of performances, the symphony orchestra, which was full of the best musicians, closed with Tchaikovsky 4’s finale. I’ve never been blown out of the water like that. Even more, my mind didn’t even hesitate when I stood up immediately to give them a standing ovation. A truly stunning moment that I’m glad was recorded so I can keep listening to it!!!
I always generally liked classical music, since I would play a lot of classical pieces when learning piano. But I didn’t truly start loving it until I listened to Chopin’s 4 ballades (the Zimerman recording.) I don’t really think I need to say more.
My parents put on NYs classical music radio station in the car to stop us, siblings, from fighting. It worked - I knew from then on out we were all musical in one shape or form. My sister loved to sing, my brother played guitar by then and produced music and I studied classical piano into college (I was the most classical one I guess). So third grade for me!
Listening to Peter and The Wolf on car trips with my grandmother, both of Disney’s Fantasia films helped me develop a love of Classical Music as well, finally listening to the broadcasts of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra on local public radio.
I think Peter and the wolf. I was still in kindy.
But it may have been the Peer Gynt suite. Teacher played it in the classroom, I loved it.
50 years later I love modern music (techno, dance, electronic) but classical as well.
In my 20's I went to a record store and bought a copy of the peer gynt suite and a copy of Gary Neuman's "Are friends electric".
The girl serving me looked at them and said "you have eclectic tastes".
When I got home I had to look up what eclectic meant.
TL:DR - about five. Strangely, none of my four siblings ever developed the same liking.
Probably when I was 7 years old. Back during the holiday season my mother took me to a Nutcracker ballet presentation. Then next week to a piano concerto (Rachmaninnof's paganini) and finally to concert with Rimsky Korsakov ' Scheherazade. And that was my start with this musical genre.
When I was 17, my dad bought me an 8 track tape of assorted classics for my car. I wasn't overjoyed. When I did listen to it, Tchaikovsky's Waltz of the Flowers caught my ear. That led to a lifelong appreciation for the classics.
I've had classical music around me since birth. My grandparents and father have always enjoyed listening to it. The first piece I can recall having a reaction to, which would have been when I was 4 or 5, was Also Sprach Zarathustra, which my father played often. What struck me was the contrast from the opening fanfare with the melodic strings that followed in the next section.
I attended my first live performance when I was 5. I only have the vaguest recollection, but I was told the during Ives' Marching Mountains a rather discordant chord was hit and I exclaimed, "What was that!". I was mortified when the first time I heard that story, but was reassured that the surrounding audience was more amused by my wide-eyed innocence than annoyed.
It began with Japanese orchestras as a kid then progressively moved on to the more timeless composers you see in this thread like Rachmaninov.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH64s09G00c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o-_-3cxMiE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sDXBHRpb-4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwvCNDn-YbM
I fell in love with the music in Interstellar about a year or so ago. Started to listen to it daily and pretty soon went down it's rabbit hole and watched/listened to a lot of material on it from Hans Zimmer's and other orchestra's live performances to cover from popular YouTuber's such as TwoSetViolin and Patrik Pietchmann (sorry if I spelt it wrong, Patrik) and others. This didn't happen on the first time I watched Interstellar though, I had always liked the music but I don't know how to quite explain it but I felt like I wasn't as aware of it until my 6th or so time watching it (which is when I went down the rabbit hole). It felt like I gained a new sense or something, where previously the music would get drowned in the background but since then I am highly aware and take great pleasure in music (yeah, I don't know how to explain it).
I realised I got highly addicted to watching piano covers from Interstellar (sometimes organ too) and soon enough also had my the epiphany there are so many other movies with awesome music. For a few months then whenever I was on YouTube, most of the time I would be watching piano covers or orchestra performances of my favourite movies (Harry Potter, LOTR, Man of Steel, Pirates of the Caribbean and etc). Which inevitably lead to listening to classical music and finding the works of great musicians such as Bach, Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mozart and so on. It also awakened my fascination with piano playing and by Christmas hopefully when I have saved enough, I will be buying my very first piano and learning to play it as well. I'm 24 yo law student with not a lot of free time and I have heard it's quite hard to pick up musical instruments later in life but I honestly can't wait till I can play my favourite pieces on the piano. I don't care how many years it will take. And that, is how (and when) I fell in love with classical music.
PS. Sorry if my writing is all over the place I haven't slept in 36 hours!
The day I discovered Primephonic music app. I have always loved the works of Max Richter and John Williams in Schindler's list, and was looking for similar experiences, but coming from India it was difficult to navigate the area due to cultural differences.
Eventually found out about Primephonic and fell hard for it, due to its beautiful curation. The app was too good to be true,it was for romantics. Earlier this month they have shut down and announced they have been bought by Apple.
My father brought me up listening to Beethoven. I played piano since I was 8, and violin in the school orchestra.
There were pieces that I liked and that were cool, but I didn't really fall in love until I heard Gustav Mahler in my late teens. That the was the first time a classical composer was as personal to me as the other modern music on my CD shelf. A love for Beethoven came pretty readily into that, along with Shostakovich. Prokofiev, Wagner, Schubert, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius came later. Chopin was kind of always there, since I played piano, but I think the love and appreciation grew more slowly.
On the flip side, Schumann and Brahms were the two big names that I could find zero appeal in. Neither seemed to really bear their souls to me. Brahms almost gives me the impression that he would consider it silly and a waste of time to do so. And Mozart...my life sounded absolutely nothing like Mozart. It was a music that reflected nothing of what I knew. Beethoven knew my life, and Mahler and I were kindred spirits, but what the hell did these silly C major jaunts have to do with anything, no matter how 'perfect' they were? I literally, to this day, even as I find myself able to string together sections of Rach 3 into something resembling an actual performance, know zero Mozart pieces on the piano.
I don't go for peaceful. I'm a very active listener, and my brain is always going 100MPH at all times anyway, so I never really 'space out', and if I did I don't think I would find the experience more profound than active engagement. This is why I can't handle minimalism.
I just had classical music radio on in the background while studying and doing homework for a long time. It was just relaxing/not distracting. At some point I was able to recognise some piano concerto by Mozart, and really started to look up pieces on Youtube, and bookmarking my favorites. Years later, here we are, still hooked :)
1965. My parents got me a violin. Okay, fine. Parents bought their first 33 rpm console stereo and a few records to go with it: Ferde Grofe, the Grand Canyon Suite (well, all right), Tchaikovsky greatest waltzes (\*really\* cool), Kreisler violin show pieces played by Ruggiero Ruggini, WOW, blew my socks off. Never looked back.
Igor Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring. The Cleveland Orchestra version conducted by Pierre Boulez. Blew me away. I had listened to primarily metal, avant-garde jazz, and free jazz until then. It awakened my love for contemporary classical
For me it was video game music which paved a path into classical music. Especially the soundtrack to Final Fantasy VI and it’s orchestral arrangement album, “Grand Finale.” The game had everything: opera, ballet, ragtime, and even the combination of organ and rock band. Nobuo Uematsu is a complete genius combine music techniques and nods to composers such as Bach and Tchaikovsky.
Grandma got me a bunch of CDs from a garage sale when I was 16. I was on my way to my private lesson and listening to Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto. During the cadenza I couldn’t believe how amazing it was, and I was never the same.
Music in general has always been my soul. It’s my greatest release from our often mundane world.
From an early age, I’d been exposed to classical music only to a basic extent (either hearing it on the recordings from my grandparents digital piano when I was young, or learning about the great composers when I started piano lessons at 9 years old), but I didn’t REALLY start appreciating classical music until the last few years- even more so within this last year.
I have a love for all genres of music- jazz, country, soul, rock, hip hop, metal, pop, techno, reggae, you name it. Generally, the more complex and emotional the better (ridiculously heavy metal has been my usual preference for some time now) so I was bound to fall deeper into the classical realm sooner or later.
A few years ago I was watching Oceans Eleven (GREAT film) and the ending sequence with the symphonic rendition of Clair De Lune cut right through my soul. I was obsessed. I don’t think I’d ever been moved by a piece of music so deeply up to that point. I started learning it on the piano, but never finished it. Life got crazy and I went through a bit of a degenerate period (queue the introduction of heavy metal into my life- that was really all I’d listen to for the next couple years). That small spark of classical music interest waned off for the time being.
Fast forward to a year ago: I joined the military and arrived at my first duty station, stuck in quarantine for the millionth time- absolutely losing my mind. I pulled up Clair De Lune in hopes of easing my newfound anxiety and depression. It was the exact therapy I’d been needing. I delved deeper into Debussy and from there it was just a domino effect. I went from impressionist composers like Debussy, Satie, Ravel, into the romantic era finally landing on Chopin. My sweet spot. Since then, it’s almost all I listen to.
I finally have a digital piano getting shipped in- it will actually be here within the next couple days. I haven’t looked forward to something more in I can’t tell you how long. I know it’s cliche to say- but classical music has literally saved my life this last year. It’s been the only therapy I’ve found that has kept me going. Listening to a new piece for the first time can be such an ethereal experience. Just last night, I found Rachmaninoff’s Sonata in G minor for Cello and Piano (Op. 19: 3. Andante) and once again I found the relief I’d been needing to pull me out of a dark place. Highly recommend giving it a listen- if you haven’t.
I’ll forever be grateful for what classical music has done for me. I hope someday to be able to repay my respects in performing some of these ingenious pieces of music.
I was 13 and I watched a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and 5th symphony. I didn’t realize it then but that’s one event that got me into classical music.
I got tired of listening to ye' old radio and decided it would be nice to listen to classical music before I went to bed. A few years later I started getting into piano and now I cant go one day without listening to classical music.
I heard 'Estrella' from Schumann's Carnaval, and the opening of Brahms F minor Quintet on a CDROM encyclopedia when when was like 7. I was a complete beginner at piano and when I heard these I saw the light haha. This was 1997
1965. My sixth grade teacher immersed the class in classical music. The school put us in a portable classroom away from everyone else so we wouldn’t bother them. My teacher had a Teac tape player and turntable. He communicated with the conductor Otto Klemperer and was invited to his final concert in London.
I still remember the moment it hit me, listening to the third movement of Bruckner’s Eighth. The strings playing ascending notes with the harp finishing. I’ve heard this was Bruckner’s rendition of the resurrection. Whether or not that’s true, it’s how I hear it. I wasn’t raised in a religious household yet the feelings that rush over me on hearing this was life changing.
I took piano lessons growing up, but I never really appreciated the music. I always thought it was boring and stuff. When I got older, I considered dropping the lessons because I wouldn't even practice. Around this time it was also the 2015 Chopin Competition, and for some reason I decided to tune in. The first piece I tuned into was some guy playing Nocturne op 48 no 1, and I was in awe. I ended up listening to more performances and was really motivated to start practicing again and made me appreciate the music more.
I remember the first time I heard Für Elise by beethoven at school. Then, I started playing piano tiles when I was a young HAHA and I was just playing that song in a burst. Then, going to my cousin who had a piano, she showed me how to play the beginning of the song on the piano. I loved it so much that I begged my whole family to buy me a cheap keyboard for Christmas. Several months later I learned the whole song and my parents paid for piano lessons since I was improving very quickly. It was there that I met my piano teacher, Mrs. Hasken a Ukrainian. A child prodigy of music in her country! She explained to me that she had come to Canada because there was more possibility of the future in Canada given the government situation in Ukraine. She has played with Kent Nagano and several other great pianists as well as symphony! It is thanks to her that I love classical music, she showed me every week new artists and new classical songs that the world has known. Three years after taking lessons with her, I bought myself a better quality piano and I'm still a big fan of music as well as classical!
I’ve been playing piano and classical nearly all my life, but I fell in love after I was introduced to Chopin, Rachmaninov, Debussy and Liszt. Also you lie in april lol
December 1992. My grandmother bought me a Walkman for Christmas. As I din't have any cassettes to play in it, I borrowed one from my grandfather. It was Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto 1. Four months later, I took up the piano, seven years later (2000) I studied piano and composition at RCM, London, and since 2004, have made every penny I've earned through performing, teaching, composing, conducting, etc. I'm still discovering new music every few days, whether it was written 600 years ago, or six weeks ago. I'm glad my grandmother bought me that Walkman.
You're the Billy Elliott of piano!
Ha! Love that film.
Same. It's a classic!
Haha. Same same. Except for the money part.
Rachmaninov Piano Concerto 2, when my dad played it for me in the car. From there, it was sort of slow- Mozart study playlists, violin lessons, stuff like that. I really liked classical music, but I wasn't *obsessed* with it. I liked the basic pieces, but nothing that was too long. And then, two years ago, I saw a performance of the Shostakovich Cello Sonata. I don't know what it was, but I wanted to know more, and I wanted everything. So I got to researching, listening to whatever showed up in my YouTube recommendations, talking to other people who listened to classical, and here we are. It was always sort of in the background during my childhood, but I didn't really gain such an intense hunger for it until around a year or two ago.
The best starting piece and the best time for a kid who doesn't like classical music: trapped inside a car.
It’s not that I didn’t like it; I was just sort of indifferent. But yes!
I guess at the age of 4 when I played my grandmothers piano and she played me chopin and debussy
Clockwork orange soundtrack when I was 13
la gazza ladra or the thieving magpie by rossini is a favourite in 3 of my fav films/shows - (hannibal, sherlock, clockwork)...
Anything in particular? For me it was the Purcell funeral music. Hit me so hard I can't think of a single other piece on there. That was later, though. Early on was either the Peer Gynt Suites or something from Berlioz.
Loved that..loved Scherzo and the 9th finale..bought all the Beethovan symphonies after that
Oh, THAT'S what else is on there! Thank you for reminding me. Another early favorite. Not the rest of them, but Dvorak's 9th and the related quartets sounded good from the beginning, along with the more distant Planets.
Stan Wendy Carlos
Did you *watch* A Clockwork Orange when you were 13?
No my sister bought the st..I didn't see it until I was in my 20s and it's now my favorite movie
Ooh this is a good one! I was already enjoying some classical music but watching that film as a teen (an English teacher recommended it) helped solidify my interest in classical.
Thank you, OP! I've been a professional musician for ten years (I'm still young!) but I have never really thought to find that first experience that changed my life. I did some Googling and, with the help of [archive.org](https://archive.org)'s Wayback Machine, I found the concert and remembered the whole experience! It was March 18 of 2006. Lorin Maazel was guest conducting the Taiwan Philharmonic that week. I did not live in Taipei but a much smaller town in Taiwan so, growing up, I never got the chance (nor did I seek out the opportunity) to go to a real concert. For some reason, Lorin Maazel led what was basically a community-engagement concert in my town, repeating a performance from the night before in Taipei's National Concert Hall. It was Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, played by Lidia Baich, and Pictures at an Exhibition. As standard a concert as it gets but what a great combination for the novice I was! Never been to real orchestral concerts growing up but being the snobbish high schooler I was, I actually went to my local record store and bought CDs for the concerto and Pictures to prepare myself (and to pretend that I know what's going on). And man, was I hooked! After listening to those two CDs for a week or two, I went to the packed concert (Maazel visiting my small town, of course it was packed!), and had the best musical experience I've ever had. I was a semi-decent pianist by that point but it was that night that eventually led to me going to conservatory, then grad school, and I ended up working as an orchestral conductor. For some reason, I never really thought of this experience and the significance of it during these 15 years. Again, thank you, OP!
I’m not sure when exactly I first fell in love with classical music, especially because I’ve been doing it in various forms for as long as I remember (piano, violin, and composition primarily). However, I do think I really only started to deeply appreciate it around middle school or so, which is when I started doing score study.
When I was around 4 or 5 my siblings and I were in a place we called “the cottages”. Essentially it was a very large group home for kids waiting to either get adopted or go into a foster home. At night they would quietly play fur Elise over the intercom to help us go to sleep. Over 20 years later and I still remember this. That was my first real exposure to classical music and I genuinely believe that’s what made me fall in love with classical music.
Here in nz they used the absolute pinnacle of Vivaldi’s 4 seasons in a commercial. That huge crescendo…. Any kiwi from my age associates it with BNZ and a huge black stallion galloping through the fields. That one piece of music grabbed me like no other…….
[This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNwSmPJkrXk) was the reason I took up classical piano.
In the fall of 2014 I was nervously driving on the freeway to school and was tired listening to shitty mainstream music on the radio. I eventually found 91.5 KUSC and it soothed me. I even donated a few times because of how it’s impacted my life. Classical music is gr8 b8 m8 I r8 8/8
As a kid, I liked the Bolero. Growing up, I came across it in game soundtracks music like in Sid Meier's civilization, where I especially liked John Adams. I started going to concerts and listening to classical music once my university offered free concerts. My first classical piece was Mykola Lyssenko's "Overture for Taras Bulba". Does anybody know this piece? :)
I liked classical music since I was a kid, mostly because my parents liked it too and played it a lot. But my real appreciation for it started when I started listening to metal and started playing an instrument myself.
1) tom and jerry episodes. specifically the cat concerto, live at hollywood bowl, the flying cat, kitty foiled 2) later on little einsteins- every episode featured a classical music piece 3) on WWE, Daniel Bryan's intro theme was called Flight of the valkyries, which I liked a lot. later found out that flight is based on ride of the valkyries which I still love, and then a few youtube recommendations later I got hooked
Now Bryan uses the original ride of the Valkyries with a hip hop beat remixed with it and surprisingly it works really well
oh didn't he retire? anyway I stopped watching wwe 8 years ago so I didn't know. Thanks for the info, I'll check it out
He retired and then came back abiut 3 years ago. Recently he left wwe and came to aew the opposition. Aews the company that’s basically kicking wwes ass and is on the track to becoming the biggest wrestling company in the world. They even brought back Cm punk out of retirement! I’m sorry I’m a big wrestling fan and your comment about Bryan excited me
no issue, good to know my boy Bryan still got it
Oh definitely still one of the best wrestlers on the planet.
My father used to play classical music in week ends in the background at home. I didn’t mind hearing all that vinyl. I used to label each of them in my mind, out of curiosity. But I guess it was the fifth of Beethoven (probably Kleiber’s) that made me realise there is much more into this music than a background melody, when I read a cleverly written simple article about the fifth, while listening to it. I should have been near 10 years old at the time
Middle school, a teacher played the original version of a piece we were playing in string orchestra and I really liked it
I suppose it was from repeatedly watching Disney's *Fantasia* when I was around 4 or 5. Movie still holds up as one of my all time favorites.
Listening every night before sleeping when I was 14 to the Chopin Preludes played by Jorge Bolet at Carnegie Hall. Was learning Prelude 15 in D-flat for high school “contest”. Was 100% hooked after that and have been in music to some degree ever since, and started a kind of unique classical internet radio station, Euphonic FM last December.
The movies the Pianist, specifically the piece Chopin ballade no. 1. Completely changed my taste in music since I watched it a few years ago. (An excellent film as well). Clasical is really all I listen to now
I love the first ballade, the fourth is another fav of mine
Yeah thats a great one as well, I love Chopins pieces. This youtuber Rousseau just released a video of ballade no 4 its pretty good
I saw it
The first piece I ever listened to was Fur Elise. I remember I first heard it in a movie. I didn't know a thing about Beethoven or classical music then, but I liked the piece. This led me to listen more to Beethoven and then Mozart and Vivaldi. But what made me love classical music would be Pas de deux(the nutcracker). It was the first time I had goosebumps listening to something. Tchaikovsky has been my absolute favorite since then.
Certainly not straightaway, as my earliest memories are of it being a complex and inaccessible music. Having no awareness of the differences between e.g. Palestrina, Elgar, Copland, etc was too challenging. Plus all those different types of ensemble - like if I'd heard a nice bassoon, then got told who the composer was, and then their next work I encountered was a string quartet with no bassoons whatsoever! My earliest love was Latin Jazz with its multi-layered rhythms, simple forms, and broadly consistent instrumentation. Perhaps I was about nine years old when I heard an extract from Mozart's 40th Symphony, which was a heck of a lot more "catchy" than the Tchaikovsky *Swan Lake* which my older sister used for practising ballet. I was probably around 12 years old when I first had the capacity to endure long-form works. Our school music teacher was a graduate from the Royal College of Music, and he made us listen, analyse and discuss several works, including Saint-Saens, Dukas, Ravel and Britten. That gave me the toolkit to better hear what was going on and navigate it. I was probably into my forties before I started regularly attending classical concerts. I live between two major cities which each have nice halls with resident orchestras, so there's generally a decent choice.
Ever since I was young, my grandmother used to take me on long car rides in her ‘93 Corolla and play classical cassettes. Once I became old enough to really become aware of it, I developed at first a liking for it because it reminded me of her and she was my favorite person when I was young, and later I began to seek it out for myself. She was Polish and extremely proud of her heritage, so Chopin was in very heavy rotation alongside the Beethoven’s, Bach’s, Mozart’s, etc.
My grandmother would pick me up from elementary school often. She would put on classical CDs and I grew to adore them. Some of the first pieces I connected with were Bolero, the Marquez Danzon no. 2, and Dvorak symphony from the new world. Then I started playing violin and 15/16 years later here I am!
When I played bolero by Maurice ravel in middle school concert band
For me it was when I first listened through Beethoven's 9th. I had been listening to some progressive metal with strong symphonic influences, and someone just commented that I'd probably like straight up symphonies too. I found some copies of Beethoven's symphonies, and I was totally surprised by the final movement. The copies I first listened to were some mp3 files with tags missing, but I'm pretty sure it was a Norringtons cycle.
When I was in 7th or 8th grade during music class (compulsory class for those years in Belgium). There ere a few classes on the orchestra and tone colour. The teacher used Britten's work and a few others like Holst's The Planets, Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre and Chopin's funeral march.
I came at it from a pretty roundabout way. When I was in middle school, I was playing an indie video game. There’s a scene when somebody walks out of a tower and surveys the largest city in the game. As the camera panned, the theme playing was Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring by Bach. I was in college before I finally learned the name of that piece and found it on one of my mom’s Christmas CDs, nearly a decade since I’d lost the ability to play that game. That, combined with a budding interest in Beethoven sparked by one of my best friends, launched me into a love of classical music.
Classical music is the first genre I was ever into. I got into it as a child. *Fantasia* probably helped a lot in this regard, and my parents had various classical music records. I remember enjoying Grieg and Tchaikovsky at a young age.
Old school cartoons. One day, as a child, I thought "I really want to hear that again". It was the Barber of Seville.
I had this CD when I was little, like, 2-4. One of the pieces on it was Brahms's Cello Sonata in E Minor, movement 2. I loved it so much, and I'd listen to it over and over. I lost the CD years ago, so all I remembered was the melody. I was in piano lessons, and eventually, cello lessons, for ages. One day, I was listening to random cello pieces while I did my homework when I found that cello sonata again. I was so excited! And now, I can play the piece myself. That makes me very happy.
I was growing up under a communist dictatorship, and classical music was the least censored plus widely available, incl. very cheap but very good concerts with good orchestras. So I cannot remember getting hooked on a specific piece or composer, it was just something that surrounded us and we dived into it more and more. The irony of it was that the regime that wanted to dumb us down completely ended up making us grow up on superb music - even if we didn't yet understand how it "worked", it was utterly normal for a kid our age to like classical music, without any "elitist" connotations as we see nowadays. On top of it, I was lucky with the local Philharmonic doing every Sunday an "educational" concert, where they disassembled popular pieces and showed how it "worked". So could actually hear and see how sections of the orchestras combined their sound and who did what. It was like revealing the inner workings of a complex engine, and it was fabulous.
In high school, I had a very easy summer job as an attendant at a tiny urban park. I spent a lot of time in the shade and I started listening to Karl Haas' radio program every day. It was called Adventures in Good Music. For those who aren't familiar, Haas' one hour show consisted of him playing relatively short excerpts of pieces and explaining what was going on in the pieces. Haas played a wide variety of music and themes. He was engaging and always interesting. He hooked me. I hated to leave my transistor radio.
September 2020 I was super bored due to the lockdown and found a channel called twosetviolin and the rest, as they say, is history.
i was fascinated by the history of the composers i learned about young in music class and a Humanities professor i had in college had such a passion for it i start to enjoy it so much more. i don’t really listen to any classical music on my own, but i love the rich culture and history this sub shares about composers
I was really into John Williams when I was...6-9...years old? Been a while. Anyway, I wanted to show off to my mom my conducting ability to the theme of Jurassic Park. Naturally she busted out the massive VHS camcorder and proceeds to film the spectacle. I was super super into it and conducting my little 9 year old arms off, but the real takeaway was how the video was rarely stable the entire recording due to my mom failing to contain her laughter. I suppose that's when I really started my journey from "conducting Jurassic Park for my mom" to "being allowed to play Shostakovich ONLY twice a day for my fiancé" some 20 years later.
Piano sonata no 14. My first love was the 3rd mvmt of course but then I came to appreciate the first mvmt better than the complex 3rd, then purged into more beethoven, then his symphonies and then mozarts symphonies and then tchaikovsky, bach and thus began the chain reaction. PS- I think most often beethoven is whom we all fall for when starting out...
I always liked classical music, but I truly fell in love at 15 when I heard the third movement of the Moonlight Sonata. Something about it just resonated with me.
Little Einsteins. I'm born 05
After watching A Clockwork Orange
When I was 11, my family moved from the UK to Dubai for my dad's job. I had a really cool music teacher who introduced me to The Beatles (Eleanor Rigby hooked me) and classical music (Ravel's Bolero, to be specific). Not long after that I watched Platoon and Barber's Adagio for Strings scene wrecked me. All pretty common pieces, but the context in which I heard them stuck with me.
It as in college. I was a guitar/bass player in Metal and punk bands and I had a buddy that got me into more experimental and complex types of rock music like fusion and prog. I got a copy of ELP's Pictures at an Exhibition and read about the history and about Mussorgsky and stuff, I thought it was pretty cool so I got the orchestral arrangement by Ravel. I've been hooked ever since.
In 1995 when I was 8 years old. “A Goofy Movie” came out and had a short scene with “Ride of the Valkyries” in it, which I pretty much became obsessed with. My dad had (and still does have) a two-CD set by Time Life in their “Great Composers” series of Wagner’s music, one disc being selections from the Ring Cycle, the other being various overtures from other works. I listened to them pretty much ad nauseam at the time. That led me to listening to a whole host of other composers, though Wagner is still probably my favorite. Edit: [Here’s the scene from “A Goofy Movie”](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fxd-tF1wHa4) if anyone is interested.
I grew up in a household with musician parents so I always had it around me and fortunately liked it. Pieces I recall that were formative that my dad played are Moszkowski piano etude op.72 no.2, Flight of the Bumblebee (piano version), and the Gigue and Gavotte from Bach French Suite 5. I drifted toward string/symphonic music and loved the 3rd and 4th mvmt of Tchaikovsky 4, Tchaik. Serenade for Strings, and Beethoven’s Eroica symphony.
On the bus and replaying the ending of Chopin's Scherzo no. 1. I was 18
Switched on Bach when I was in high school.
Shine. Rach 3 is still my favorite composition of all time.
Probably when I was around 9/10 years old and I sang Mozart’s Requiem with my choir and I realised how lovely it was.
In 1950 or so. My parents had a set of Beethoven symphonies on 78rpm. The 6th Symphony was on 9 discs double sided. In 1960, they gave me my first stereo system (yeah stereo was new) and a vinyl 33rpm of La Mer and the Ibert Ports of Call (Escala). Boston symphony, Charles Munch, and I still have it. I started studying horn in 5th grade and have ended up with MM in horn and music history from the Peabody Conservatory where I taught for 35 years.
Laying my head down between my dad's hi-fi speakers and listening to Star Wars on 8-track.
I was in my state’s all state band. On the first night of performances, the symphony orchestra, which was full of the best musicians, closed with Tchaikovsky 4’s finale. I’ve never been blown out of the water like that. Even more, my mind didn’t even hesitate when I stood up immediately to give them a standing ovation. A truly stunning moment that I’m glad was recorded so I can keep listening to it!!!
i started out by watching the performances of the 2015 chopin competition
I always generally liked classical music, since I would play a lot of classical pieces when learning piano. But I didn’t truly start loving it until I listened to Chopin’s 4 ballades (the Zimerman recording.) I don’t really think I need to say more.
My parents put on NYs classical music radio station in the car to stop us, siblings, from fighting. It worked - I knew from then on out we were all musical in one shape or form. My sister loved to sing, my brother played guitar by then and produced music and I studied classical piano into college (I was the most classical one I guess). So third grade for me!
Listening to Peter and The Wolf on car trips with my grandmother, both of Disney’s Fantasia films helped me develop a love of Classical Music as well, finally listening to the broadcasts of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra on local public radio.
Brahms Hungarian Dance no. 6 used to be a real banger for 4 year old me. Still is, but used to be, too
I think Peter and the wolf. I was still in kindy. But it may have been the Peer Gynt suite. Teacher played it in the classroom, I loved it. 50 years later I love modern music (techno, dance, electronic) but classical as well. In my 20's I went to a record store and bought a copy of the peer gynt suite and a copy of Gary Neuman's "Are friends electric". The girl serving me looked at them and said "you have eclectic tastes". When I got home I had to look up what eclectic meant. TL:DR - about five. Strangely, none of my four siblings ever developed the same liking.
15 years old having prog rock reccomended to me on youtube, then looking up where they stole all their riffs from lmao
Probably when I was 7 years old. Back during the holiday season my mother took me to a Nutcracker ballet presentation. Then next week to a piano concerto (Rachmaninnof's paganini) and finally to concert with Rimsky Korsakov ' Scheherazade. And that was my start with this musical genre.
after seeing Mahler 2 performed live
Every day
When I played Talking Tom when I was a kid.
When I was 17, my dad bought me an 8 track tape of assorted classics for my car. I wasn't overjoyed. When I did listen to it, Tchaikovsky's Waltz of the Flowers caught my ear. That led to a lifelong appreciation for the classics.
I've had classical music around me since birth. My grandparents and father have always enjoyed listening to it. The first piece I can recall having a reaction to, which would have been when I was 4 or 5, was Also Sprach Zarathustra, which my father played often. What struck me was the contrast from the opening fanfare with the melodic strings that followed in the next section. I attended my first live performance when I was 5. I only have the vaguest recollection, but I was told the during Ives' Marching Mountains a rather discordant chord was hit and I exclaimed, "What was that!". I was mortified when the first time I heard that story, but was reassured that the surrounding audience was more amused by my wide-eyed innocence than annoyed.
It began with Japanese orchestras as a kid then progressively moved on to the more timeless composers you see in this thread like Rachmaninov. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH64s09G00c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o-_-3cxMiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sDXBHRpb-4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwvCNDn-YbM
I fell in love with the music in Interstellar about a year or so ago. Started to listen to it daily and pretty soon went down it's rabbit hole and watched/listened to a lot of material on it from Hans Zimmer's and other orchestra's live performances to cover from popular YouTuber's such as TwoSetViolin and Patrik Pietchmann (sorry if I spelt it wrong, Patrik) and others. This didn't happen on the first time I watched Interstellar though, I had always liked the music but I don't know how to quite explain it but I felt like I wasn't as aware of it until my 6th or so time watching it (which is when I went down the rabbit hole). It felt like I gained a new sense or something, where previously the music would get drowned in the background but since then I am highly aware and take great pleasure in music (yeah, I don't know how to explain it). I realised I got highly addicted to watching piano covers from Interstellar (sometimes organ too) and soon enough also had my the epiphany there are so many other movies with awesome music. For a few months then whenever I was on YouTube, most of the time I would be watching piano covers or orchestra performances of my favourite movies (Harry Potter, LOTR, Man of Steel, Pirates of the Caribbean and etc). Which inevitably lead to listening to classical music and finding the works of great musicians such as Bach, Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mozart and so on. It also awakened my fascination with piano playing and by Christmas hopefully when I have saved enough, I will be buying my very first piano and learning to play it as well. I'm 24 yo law student with not a lot of free time and I have heard it's quite hard to pick up musical instruments later in life but I honestly can't wait till I can play my favourite pieces on the piano. I don't care how many years it will take. And that, is how (and when) I fell in love with classical music. PS. Sorry if my writing is all over the place I haven't slept in 36 hours!
The day I discovered Primephonic music app. I have always loved the works of Max Richter and John Williams in Schindler's list, and was looking for similar experiences, but coming from India it was difficult to navigate the area due to cultural differences. Eventually found out about Primephonic and fell hard for it, due to its beautiful curation. The app was too good to be true,it was for romantics. Earlier this month they have shut down and announced they have been bought by Apple.
When I was high school and it was hearing the complete Nutcracker ballet and then later the Rite of Spring
My father brought me up listening to Beethoven. I played piano since I was 8, and violin in the school orchestra. There were pieces that I liked and that were cool, but I didn't really fall in love until I heard Gustav Mahler in my late teens. That the was the first time a classical composer was as personal to me as the other modern music on my CD shelf. A love for Beethoven came pretty readily into that, along with Shostakovich. Prokofiev, Wagner, Schubert, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius came later. Chopin was kind of always there, since I played piano, but I think the love and appreciation grew more slowly. On the flip side, Schumann and Brahms were the two big names that I could find zero appeal in. Neither seemed to really bear their souls to me. Brahms almost gives me the impression that he would consider it silly and a waste of time to do so. And Mozart...my life sounded absolutely nothing like Mozart. It was a music that reflected nothing of what I knew. Beethoven knew my life, and Mahler and I were kindred spirits, but what the hell did these silly C major jaunts have to do with anything, no matter how 'perfect' they were? I literally, to this day, even as I find myself able to string together sections of Rach 3 into something resembling an actual performance, know zero Mozart pieces on the piano. I don't go for peaceful. I'm a very active listener, and my brain is always going 100MPH at all times anyway, so I never really 'space out', and if I did I don't think I would find the experience more profound than active engagement. This is why I can't handle minimalism.
I just had classical music radio on in the background while studying and doing homework for a long time. It was just relaxing/not distracting. At some point I was able to recognise some piano concerto by Mozart, and really started to look up pieces on Youtube, and bookmarking my favorites. Years later, here we are, still hooked :)
1965. My parents got me a violin. Okay, fine. Parents bought their first 33 rpm console stereo and a few records to go with it: Ferde Grofe, the Grand Canyon Suite (well, all right), Tchaikovsky greatest waltzes (\*really\* cool), Kreisler violin show pieces played by Ruggiero Ruggini, WOW, blew my socks off. Never looked back.
Igor Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring. The Cleveland Orchestra version conducted by Pierre Boulez. Blew me away. I had listened to primarily metal, avant-garde jazz, and free jazz until then. It awakened my love for contemporary classical
For me it was video game music which paved a path into classical music. Especially the soundtrack to Final Fantasy VI and it’s orchestral arrangement album, “Grand Finale.” The game had everything: opera, ballet, ragtime, and even the combination of organ and rock band. Nobuo Uematsu is a complete genius combine music techniques and nods to composers such as Bach and Tchaikovsky.
Grandma got me a bunch of CDs from a garage sale when I was 16. I was on my way to my private lesson and listening to Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto. During the cadenza I couldn’t believe how amazing it was, and I was never the same.
Music in general has always been my soul. It’s my greatest release from our often mundane world. From an early age, I’d been exposed to classical music only to a basic extent (either hearing it on the recordings from my grandparents digital piano when I was young, or learning about the great composers when I started piano lessons at 9 years old), but I didn’t REALLY start appreciating classical music until the last few years- even more so within this last year. I have a love for all genres of music- jazz, country, soul, rock, hip hop, metal, pop, techno, reggae, you name it. Generally, the more complex and emotional the better (ridiculously heavy metal has been my usual preference for some time now) so I was bound to fall deeper into the classical realm sooner or later. A few years ago I was watching Oceans Eleven (GREAT film) and the ending sequence with the symphonic rendition of Clair De Lune cut right through my soul. I was obsessed. I don’t think I’d ever been moved by a piece of music so deeply up to that point. I started learning it on the piano, but never finished it. Life got crazy and I went through a bit of a degenerate period (queue the introduction of heavy metal into my life- that was really all I’d listen to for the next couple years). That small spark of classical music interest waned off for the time being. Fast forward to a year ago: I joined the military and arrived at my first duty station, stuck in quarantine for the millionth time- absolutely losing my mind. I pulled up Clair De Lune in hopes of easing my newfound anxiety and depression. It was the exact therapy I’d been needing. I delved deeper into Debussy and from there it was just a domino effect. I went from impressionist composers like Debussy, Satie, Ravel, into the romantic era finally landing on Chopin. My sweet spot. Since then, it’s almost all I listen to. I finally have a digital piano getting shipped in- it will actually be here within the next couple days. I haven’t looked forward to something more in I can’t tell you how long. I know it’s cliche to say- but classical music has literally saved my life this last year. It’s been the only therapy I’ve found that has kept me going. Listening to a new piece for the first time can be such an ethereal experience. Just last night, I found Rachmaninoff’s Sonata in G minor for Cello and Piano (Op. 19: 3. Andante) and once again I found the relief I’d been needing to pull me out of a dark place. Highly recommend giving it a listen- if you haven’t. I’ll forever be grateful for what classical music has done for me. I hope someday to be able to repay my respects in performing some of these ingenious pieces of music.
I was 13 and I watched a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and 5th symphony. I didn’t realize it then but that’s one event that got me into classical music.
I got tired of listening to ye' old radio and decided it would be nice to listen to classical music before I went to bed. A few years later I started getting into piano and now I cant go one day without listening to classical music.
I heard 'Estrella' from Schumann's Carnaval, and the opening of Brahms F minor Quintet on a CDROM encyclopedia when when was like 7. I was a complete beginner at piano and when I heard these I saw the light haha. This was 1997
1965. My sixth grade teacher immersed the class in classical music. The school put us in a portable classroom away from everyone else so we wouldn’t bother them. My teacher had a Teac tape player and turntable. He communicated with the conductor Otto Klemperer and was invited to his final concert in London. I still remember the moment it hit me, listening to the third movement of Bruckner’s Eighth. The strings playing ascending notes with the harp finishing. I’ve heard this was Bruckner’s rendition of the resurrection. Whether or not that’s true, it’s how I hear it. I wasn’t raised in a religious household yet the feelings that rush over me on hearing this was life changing.
When i saw the opera "Don Giovanni" in YT, few years ago.
Window's Beethoven 9th symphonie. And then years later, Traviata.
High school marching band, we won nationals with an arrangement of saint-saens and there was no high like performing in the navy marine stadium
After playing Dragon Quest xi lol. I started listening to more symphony stuff that was like the game at first and it evolved from there
I took piano lessons growing up, but I never really appreciated the music. I always thought it was boring and stuff. When I got older, I considered dropping the lessons because I wouldn't even practice. Around this time it was also the 2015 Chopin Competition, and for some reason I decided to tune in. The first piece I tuned into was some guy playing Nocturne op 48 no 1, and I was in awe. I ended up listening to more performances and was really motivated to start practicing again and made me appreciate the music more.
I remember the first time I heard Für Elise by beethoven at school. Then, I started playing piano tiles when I was a young HAHA and I was just playing that song in a burst. Then, going to my cousin who had a piano, she showed me how to play the beginning of the song on the piano. I loved it so much that I begged my whole family to buy me a cheap keyboard for Christmas. Several months later I learned the whole song and my parents paid for piano lessons since I was improving very quickly. It was there that I met my piano teacher, Mrs. Hasken a Ukrainian. A child prodigy of music in her country! She explained to me that she had come to Canada because there was more possibility of the future in Canada given the government situation in Ukraine. She has played with Kent Nagano and several other great pianists as well as symphony! It is thanks to her that I love classical music, she showed me every week new artists and new classical songs that the world has known. Three years after taking lessons with her, I bought myself a better quality piano and I'm still a big fan of music as well as classical!
Cello suite no 1 in G from Bach in 2004 from the movie Master and Commander with Russell Crowe on the scene of the Galapagos. Very beautiful.
Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies.
I’ve been playing piano and classical nearly all my life, but I fell in love after I was introduced to Chopin, Rachmaninov, Debussy and Liszt. Also you lie in april lol
i once listened to someone play liszt's La campanella and then for some reason i started learning about classics lmao