Brahms' Variations are better than mine, but mine were written before his.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Brahms is one of my all-time favorite composers.
That was one of the big problems when I was at Harvard studying music. We had to write choral pieces in the style of Brahms or Mendelssohn, which was distressing because in the end you realized how good Brahms is, and how bad you are.
After working with Ligeti I began to hear Brahms and Beethoven differently.
To my mind and ear, there is simply nothing that compares to the musical sophistication of a late Beethoven, Bartok, Schubert or Brahms work for minimal forces.
I think Mozart's operas 'The Marriage of Figaro' and 'Don Giovanni' are the two most perfect ever written. The music is magical.
I am not one of the great composers. All the great have produced enormously. There is everything in their work - the best and the worst, but there is always quantity. But I have written relatively little.
I played a lot of Bach's partitas and sonatas; I like the way that Bach was abstracting already from these dance forms.
On my mental iPod, I always have Stravinsky and Ravel.
The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost.
I abhor the words 'classical music.' Few things satisfy me more than a really good cover version.