favourite moment in recorded music

[bluthner]

Here is another 'your favourite X' topic:

I would be interested to hear about your favourite moment (i.e., most thrilling, moving etc. 10 seconds or so) in recorded music.

There is a good thread on this topic from 2005, but that comes without audio; and there used to be a serial on Dutch radio, long since discontinued like so many good things, where I remember Louis Andriessen enthusing about the entry of the flute in bar 34 of the slow movement of the Ravel G-minor concerto.

My all-time favourite moment -- well, one of them anyway -- comes at 3.09 minutes into John Ogdon’s recording of the Alkan Concerto for solo piano op. 39:

 

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Makes my blood run cold, over and over again... Compare this with the graceless mess that Hamelin, unaccountably, makes of the same passage in his Hyperion recording!

[sevencircles]

Great, Ogdon was in my opinion, at least as good as Richter, before his mental breakdown.

I have never mastered the electric guitar but Uli Jon Roth is showing the potential of the instrument in this solo compilation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaU-6em3pUA

I had goosebumbs the whole concert when I saw him live.

Extremely few pop recordings done before 1980 can be considered timeless musical masterpieces.

The Great Curve by Talking Heads is a true masterpiece of polyrhythms. Even the production sounds like it could have been done today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW1IqW6kNdU
 

[rv]

One of my all time favorite moments in all music is Sofronitsky playing the Scriabin Fantasie

Listen from the start and wait until the highly romantic part comes in at 1:54 to 2:20.
The way he plays that is just out of this world.

And of course later the climax as well.

[rv]

for rock music I have only one serious contender

the solo from Pink Floyd - Comfortably Numb (P.U.L.S.E.)

favorite moment is 3:12 - end

[sevencircles]

for rock music I have only one serious contender

the solo from Pink Floyd - Comfortably Numb (P.U.L.S.E.)

favorite moment is 3:12 - end

Wonderfull song, not many notes in the guitarsolo but it fits perfectly

[ethure]

Joe Hisaishi - One Summer Day

1:54-1:58

it may not work for everyone, but each time I listen to it, those several suddenly-weakened-down notes can always scratch up what's the softest in your heart, bringing you some emotion that's so indescribable. sometimes I go over the whole piece to just feel those few seconds.

[bluthner]

Thanks, rv, for the Sofronitsky which I didn't know. Just had to try that bit from the Scriabin Fantasy myself, but can't get anywhere near the magic of it...

And thanks, ethure, for the Hisaishi: didn't think it would work for me, but it rather did after all.

Here, to make up for my unkind words about Hamelin in the original post, is the great man on top form in Medtner's Improvisation op. 31.1 from the Composer-Pianists album: maximum thrills at 4:07 min., nothing on his all-Medtner albums beats this, I think.

[brogers70]

Stuttgart Cahmber Orchestra, 1951 recording of the 5th Brandenburg Concerto, the moment near the end of the harpsichord candenza just before the orchestra returns, about 9:54. There's a brief very pause that always choked me up, an example using tiny changes in rhythm to make a harpsichord truly expressive.

[sashaco]

Without thinking too much, I'll say Elly Ameling singing the first line of the the last verse of Les Roses D'Ispahan, by Faure.  The "Oh" of "Oh que ton jeune amour, ce papillon leger" really got to me when I heard it over 30 years ago.  Ameling frequently amazes me with a single note or phrase, particularly with entrances. From that same recording I loved "Ne m'abandonez pas" from "En priere".  Her voice goes from not being there to being there with no apparent transition, at least in my recollection.

[lhommearme]

Dufay-Kyrie from Missa l'homme arme.

[rv]

Another contender: Scriabin - The Poem of Ecstasy

The final part from 7:15 until te end. Absolutely miraculous moment. And of course, u need to have listened to the whole thing in the first place or it won't have the same effect

[pianoplayjl]

The whole thing of Rachmaninoff's 3rd piano concerto, played by Byron Janis. In my opinion that is the greatest recording of Rachmaninoff's 3rd.