Love List:
Classical & Romantic Music by Jonathan Biss

Mendelssohn’s piano music manages to be both effortlessly fluid and profound. Perahia plays it with directness, lyricism, and total beauty.

Ferrier’s voice and Schubert’s music are two things which make me believe there must be some higher power in this universe; combined here (along with Britten’s marvelous playing), the result is overwhelming.

Casals evidently thought this was one of the best things he ever participated in; I agree. Each variation is more moving than the last, and every note is deeply meaningful.

If you polled ten classical musicians on the question of what they’d like to have played at their funeral, I suspect five would choose this movement. It is not difficult to understand why: on top of the astonishing beauty of the music, there is little to say about life, and death, that Schubert doesn’t manage to say here.

I could listen to Cortot play Schumann all day, even day, even though his choices are almost invariably different than mine. His performance of the Prophet Bird locates the precise nexus of poetry and mystery.

A fifteen-minute-long hymn, this music is equally an expression of love. When I listen to Leon Fleisher – my teacher and one of the unforgettable artists of the last century – play it, I feel that he is in the room with me.

I think the last Beethoven string quartets have to be the deepest music ever written. The slow movement of op. 127 is a special favourite of mine, played here with utter intensity and commitment by the Busches.

Schumann’s operatic music is as unjustly neglected as his lieder are beloved. It’s hard to pick a favourite Faust excerpt, but this chorus is strangely moving in a way that captures the essence of Schumann’s personality.

The F minor quartet is perhaps the darkest piece Mendelssohn wrote, but this movement is all consolation. The Elias Quartet capture it with aching tenderness.

I can’t think of a movement of music with a wider emotional range: from deepest despair, to absolute euphoria. Schnabel captures the full spectrum as only he could.