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Free Classical Music

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Started 13 years ago by watcher13
Latest reply from watcher13

watcher13
Member

Since this is, in a way, "the land of the free", I'm a little surprised this hasn't been mentioned before. Assuming it's still okay to mention non-software freebies:

I've been trying to upgrade my miniscule classical music library with freebies (being out of work and out of money), so let me mention two sites. The first is Classic Cat. The webmaster of Classic Cat scours the internet for free classical downloads. If there's a rub, it's that much of this music is played by semi-pros and amateurs. That's not a bad thing in itself - I go to local concerts alot and enjoy myself considerably. For those new to classical music though, this much should probably be said: many of the more complex classics can be off putting with the wrong intrepreter. Even the greatest artists who've had fantastic performances or made brilliant recordings of one composer can make a dull, sometimes misshapen mess out of another's works. Doesn't happen often, but does happen. So a source of performances by the top artists would be preferrable. There are some gems on Classic Cat - mainly links to the "Liber Liber" site, which is an Italian project trying to make as many books and recordings available under the Creative Commons license and features some classic recordings from the past.
Liber Liber
Classic Cat's policy is to only link to material that has a streaming rate of 128 Kbps or above (FM radio quality), but it makes an exception for some of these - many of which are from the days of mono and lower fidelity. It also features links to LOTS of lower fidelity downloads on it's link page.

Still, as I say, a source of free commercial recordings could occassionally provide some real bargains. So, as Bill Cosby once said on an album: "I told you that story so I could tell you this one."

That is Classical.com. This is a repository of over 100,000 classical files. Unfortunately, it's - understandably - a pay site. You can listen to snatches of music for free, but you've got to subscribe - at $100 a year -to hear the full file. It's also a place where you can buy and download tons of mp3 clips by just registering. But, for us freebie fans, they give away a free album download every week, just for registering. So far in 2 weeks, I've gotten no spam. They also keep the links to the free albums up for 3 weeks. Not all are gems, many are just standard performances from smaller orchestra's or lesser conductors - still nice to have for free - but occassionally they get performances by "specialists" in certain types of music that are highly recommendable.

I strongly recommend the download from 3 weeks ago. A collection of Schubert songs given the posthumous title "Swan Song" (Schwangesang). This includes one of his most famous songs (and Schubert was one of the greatest of song composers) "Serenade" (Standchen). These are performed by a fine opera baritone who has become something of a German art song (lieder) specialist on the side, Jose Van Dam. To me, he's perfect for this material and I can highly recommend it. They put up a new album (actually most of the performances are from the '90s) every Tuesday, so you've only got a couple days to grab this one.

Unfortunately, there's also a rub with the free albums. Classical.com hasn't taken much care in encoding some of these and some are full of digital garbling. I've run them through the freeware editor Audacity and it's sampling filters - much better than Windows Media Player or VLC - get a lot of this out, but some still are full of hiccups and pops which are not reducible with normal filtering. That ruined last weeks album, a beautiful collection of Handel opera arias, performed by a highly respected group of artists. I'll probably have to work hard to salvage maybe 2/3rds of that album. But I only noticed a couple of pops very late in the Schubert album and I haven't even run it through Audacity yet. Also, each album is offered in both 128 and the better 192 kbps, although Classical.com seems sloppier about the 192 recordings. If you're interested, download both and you might be able to mix and match to make a clean album. I think I'll be able to take advantage of that and get a perfect, or nearly so, Swan Song.

If anyone's interested in this thread, I'll try and post back when I think one of the freebies are worth downloading - or I find a good one on Classic Cat or Liber Liber. (I found a couple already there, but this post's already too long.)

The phone's shut off at home, so no DSL. I'll try and check in when I can. Happy listening/downloading.

Posted 13 years ago #
Idunnobutiwastold
Gaming Acolyte

Hello Watcher13,
Thank you for the links and their description. :)

Posted 13 years ago #
watcher13
Member

You're welcome! Hope they can do you some good.

Posted 13 years ago #
Inas
Member

Thanks much for the wonderful resources, Watcher13.
Inas

Posted 13 years ago #
pavid
gamer extraordinaire & knowledgeable computer nerd who likes to argue, but is still a very nice guy

Thanks Watcher13. I enjoy classical musical and have added the sites to my bookmarks. The only downside is going to be my bandwidth limit. :)

Posted 13 years ago #
watcher13
Member

You folks are welcome. For clarification, the classical.com downloads - which are zipped just to use as an album container, but not compressed - are on the average of 92M for a 192 download and 59M for a 128. The mp3s that Classic Cat links to vary, of course, by the size of the piece and the streaming rate (if that info. helps anybody decide whether these downloads are worth spending the time). But, even people on dial-up could download at least one short piece a day and eventually build up a library of nuggets.

If I can get caught up on my listening, I'll try to recommend a few short peices from Classic Cat. I've got some piano music now I'm checking out. Of course, I'd be interested to hear what you folks think about any of these that you download and listen to and would recommend, from whatever online source. I'd think this thread would be appropriate for that.

Posted 13 years ago #
watcher13
Member

Not trying to bump the thread here. Just realized I had an inaccuracy in my first post that might cause a problem. I thought that classical.com kept the last 3 weeks of free albums up, but it looks like the third one is rotated from the collection, so there's really two free albums every week, and you likely need to check back every week if you don't want to miss an offer - which is probably their reason for doing that.

This week's one timer features 2 of the 4 famous musical versions of Maurice Maeterlinck's psychological play about free will and doomed lovers - Pelleas and Melisande. It has 2 tone poems by Jean Sibelius and Arnold Schoenberg. This is modern, often foreboding and challenging music, if you're interested. It will probably be replaced tomorrow evening - looks like the change is Monday night, vice Tuesday (I think they're a European site, so, of course depends on where you are.)

I can't recommend (or reject) this, as I haven't downloaded it, yet. I wasn't interested in the performers. To be fair, though, I understand the conductor - Michael Schonwandt - is a respected star on the Scandinavian and German scenes.

Also, I misspelled Schwanengesang above. Left out a couple letters in the middle. Oops.

Posted 13 years ago #
watcher13
Member

Frustration! I would have wholeheartedly recommended last week's "wildcard" (3rd) album - a collection of beautiful French impressionistic favorites by Debussy and Ravel, led by a conductor who specializes in the stuff - but every cut has at least one audio scar on it. And that's the 192. The 128 is SO mangled it isn't worth spending even ONE second to download. To quote Charlie Brown: ARGHHH!

But I didn't post just to bore you with that. Since Classical.com has been dissappointing lately, let me post those links to short piano music I promised. Through Classic Cat, I found these on the Liber Liber site. Short Brahms and Mozart played by an artist known for his interpretations of their music - the early to mid 20th century pianist Wilhelm Backhaus. He's not the last word in dynamic peformance, but he's idiomatic. Since that's one of my main criteria, please indulge my explanation of that term. In relation to what I said in the first post, some artists find brilliant nuances in pieces that even the composer may never have realized are in there; some artists inject their own ego into the pieces and somewhat modify them away from the composers vision - sometimes disastrously and sometimes in a wonderfully revelatory manner (look up Glenn Gould); and some artists just try and step out of the way and let the composers speak for themselves. These are often specialists in those composer's music and (regardless of that) are frequently called "idiomatic" performers. IMHO, I think these are the best introductions for newer listeners and that's why I recommend them.

The Liber Liber music is placed on pages dedicated to that composer, and so I'll just post the pages and you'll have a whole collection of Brahms and Mozart to search through. The Backhaus consists of the 16 Brahms waltzes, Opus 39; and the first Rhapsody (free form piece), Op. 79; a Mozart Fantasia (another free form piece), K. 475; an earlier Sonata with a 1st movement based on the same material, K. 475; a Rondo (a piece that constantly leaves and returns to the main melody, like A-B-A-C-A-B-A), and a famous Sonata, whose famous last movement is a Rondo based on a sped up imitation Turkish military march (very popular in those days - look up Janissaries), the K. 311 "Rondo alla Turca" sonata.
Brahms
Mozart
All the Backhaus is mono and the waltzes are from 78s recorded in the 30s - though any scratches have been expertly mastered out - so they're lower fidelity. But everything else was probably recorded by Austrian radio at the 1956 Salzburg Mozart Festival (his hometown) and is pristine and FM radio quality (128 KBps).

I also posted to mention another source I forgot - Amazon - who have a LOT of free cuts of all kinds of music. Unfortunately, you've go through a registration process that requires some personal info., like your birthday. I haven't tried it yet. Maybe one of you folks can tell us if Amazon is intrusive or not.

Also, at one time, Danish Radio was giving away free downloads. They gave a bunch of Mozart symphonies away on his 250th jubille in 2006, and I got a free version of a live performance of Beethoven's 2nd symphony a couple years ago. Pretty good! They have a dynamic young(ish) conductor, whose name escapes me right now. Unfortunately, the Danish sight is a little hard to find a good online translator for, so I'm still trying to determine if they're giving anything away currently.

Forgive my cliche, but I can't think how else to end, so Happy Listening!

Posted 13 years ago #
pavid
gamer extraordinaire & knowledgeable computer nerd who likes to argue, but is still a very nice guy

Thanks Watcher, my download bandwidth is taking a beating but this stuff is great. :)

A suggestion if I may. Your download links in the last post should be edited to remove everything between "http://" and "www.liberliber..." to make them direct links to the appropriate locations.

With reference to Amazon, I have registered with them and do not find them at all intrusive. Unfortunately though, it seems you need to be a United States resident in order to access the free stuff. :( Still the links you have given us offer plenty of music pleasure to satisfy any Classical music fan.

Posted 13 years ago #
Whiterabbit-uk
Games Guru

That's a shame. I was hoping to download some of that stuff. I suppose the licences are restricted to the US. Pity.

Posted 13 years ago #
BentlyTCow
Member

I don't know if this adds to the discussion any (as it's not a download but free streaming radio) but there is a university that has two classical radio stations, one with a mix of news and classical music (which, as far as I know is about 90% music throughout the week) and another station that is classical only. There's a third station that is a mix of non-mainstream music as well, but isn't really relevant to this post. At any rate, this should be available anywhere as it is ad-free and funded by listener donations and has been for many years.

http://wosu.org/radio/

If you scroll down to the bottom of that page there is 'current' and 'next' program information as well as links to complete schedules.

Maybe streaming classical music is available all over the internet and I'm not aware of it, but this is at least ad-free and completely family-friendly. Hopefully it's useful to someone!

Posted 13 years ago #
watcher13
Member

Well, I'm glad this is helping some folks! I'm certainly enjoying it. :) And I come bearing good news! But, first, to respond to your great posts: On the links, OOPS! Actually, I've always been lazy about writing the html code to markup my posts, including titling links. (That's why you see me use caps, instead of bold, for emphasis.) I usually just post links. So, I finally decided to pretend I was sophisticated and use the buttons provided in with the posting box. It worked in post number one, but I have no idea where I picked up the additional part of the address. It sort of makes sense, but sort of doesn't, since I copied and pasted directly from the Liber Liber pages, so I have no idea how the GOTD part of the address got in there. I did it in a hurry and botched it. Let's try again.Brahms
Mozart

Thanks for your insights on Amazon, too, Pavid. Still out of work and working on public terminals and so can't try. Sorry, WR. I thought there an Amazon UK? If so, maybe they offer similar free mp3s. Or maybe one of Amazon's foreign language sites. I'm pretty sure they have a German. As to bandwidth, it might be worth an occassional trip to your local library, Pavid. At a couple of places I use, the T1s can download these onto my stick in 5 minutes or less.

Thanks, Bentley. WOSU, the Ohio State University station may be the oldest public radio station in the US. It's good stuff. Though I'm sort of sloppily using the word streaming here, what we're concentrating on is permanently usable mp3 downloads, although there are streaming recorders. But stations like those, I think, certainly are germain, as they are a great resource, especially for newbies. Actually, almost all the public radio stations steam, so there are hundreds available on the net, plus a TON of other streaming sources for you to enjoy. I don't talk enough about the links link on Classic Cat. It's chock full of that kind of stuff, including internet radio.

Well, I started this post too late. There flashing the lights at the library. Closing time!

What I stopped be to say is: You absolutely must download this weeks classical.com freebie. It's pristine and it's an album of crowd pleasers that everyone, even people with no appreciation for classical can appreciate. More next time I post.

Posted 13 years ago #
Robert
StrayCat

Thanks Watcher.

(only testing links)

Brahms
Mozart

But I can't get the pages to load...

Posted 13 years ago #
watcher13
Member

Gee, I don't know what the deal is, Robert?!? They're up now. Either they were down at the time you happen to try, or there may be something about them your browse's rejecting, like maybe a script. I'm trying them on IE right now. Maybe it's a Firefox thing, if you're using that. Are you using any of those good Firefox add-ons, like Add-Blocker or NoScript that could be interfering? I hope you can get those pages, eventually.

WR, there might be something for you. I'm thinking that pavid might have been using amazon.ca which doesn't seem to offer mp3 downloads. And when he tried to register on amazon.com it detected he was north of the border. But you might be able to register on amazon.co.uk. They're offering free mp3, but currently no classical. Correct me if I'm wrong, pavid.

As to Amazon in general, it looks like it might be a better source for other types of music, and not classical. Unless I'm doing something wrong, I can only pull up 11 free classical downloads on amazon.com and none of them are full pieces - though that's certainly what one would expect. I'm not naive enough to think there going to give away the store - only small samples.

Anyway, still don't have time this session to spell out why I heartily recommend this weeks freebie on classical.com - crowd pleasers from Bizet. But I do! Download it! Later, gators.

Posted 13 years ago #
watcher13
Member

Okay, this is why I say download this weeks freebie from Classical.com. It's an album of crowd pleasing orchestral pieces from the great french composer Georges Bizet. It consists of 4 selections of music he did for the stage, adapted for orchestra into collections - this type of collected piece is called a suite. In this album you've got the two standard suites from his opera Carmen - one of the most popular operas EVER - and the two suites that actually first made him famous - the music he wrote to accompany the play, "The Girl from Arles" (L'Arlessiene). So you have eighteen highly appealing marches, songs, romantic interludes, country scenes, and night songs. Many newbies will be surprised that they even recognize a couple of these - at least the Song/March of the Torreadors (bullfighters) and the sexy Habanera song/dance (both from Carmen). Some of this music has been borrowed many times for commercials, films, silent films, sitcoms, and so forth.

And, even if you're not a classical fan, get this anyway. If you've ever gone to a movie and felt the power of the full orchestral music, even if just the opening theme of a flick like the Star Wars films or the Ring Trilogy or Tim Burton's Batman, you can relate to this kind of classical music.

Also, this disc is a bargain for 2 reasons. The performers are The National Orchestra of Lille conducted by Jean-Claude Casadesus. Casadesus is a member of France's most famous musical family and in 1976 he created the Lille Orchestra from the dust of another disintegrating outfit and turned it into an internationally known touring outfit who, among other things, specialize in French music. (Note, I looked it up. Try allmusic.com for one. I don't want to pretend I'm an expert here, though I have dabbled. But, I'm just a happy collator, NOT an expert. But I am confident in the info. I post, or I wouldn't mention it.) Also, to be honest, this is the type of music that it's kinda hard to mess up, though that's not a slap at Bizet, a quite sophisticated composer who died unfortunately young.

The other thing is that I'm glad I spoke too soon about the quality of some of these files. This one might just be perfect. I went through both the 192 and the 128K files and didn't hear a click, pop, or garble, though I was multi-tasking at the time. Bandwidth or not, you WON'T regret downloading this one.

There is one rub though. They named the pieces individually, so all the first pieces of the suites are numbered 1, the second 2, etc., and so are the track #s, so you have four 1s, four 2s, and so on, and everything's mixed up. You're going to have to renumber them to get them into the right order. The album order is Carmen #1, #2, and L'Arlessiene #1 and #2. And all the pieces are internally in the right order. You're just going to have to change the numbers they through in the titles (or eliminate them), or the track numbers in the tags (metadata) or both to 5-10 (Carmen #2), 11-14 (L'Arlessiene #1) and 15-18 (L'Arlessiene #2) to get them into the album order. A pain, but a small one.

Also, some of the mp3s have a little too much silence at the end, so you might want to trim them. A simple free trimmer for novices is mptrim

http://www.mptrim.com/

and a more capable free one, though still simple, is mp3DirectCut

http://mpesch3.de1.cc/mp3dc.html

and, of course, there's always the ever popular fullish free suite Audacity:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

You can change tags in Windows Media Player and a Gizmo editor says TagScanner's easier - and portable - but I haven't tried it:

http://www.xdlab.ru/en/index.htm

Happy listening!

Posted 13 years ago #
watcher13
Member

I've been too out of touch to keep up with the freebies on Classical.com this week, so I'm giving a "sort of" recommendation. You might want to try the 3rd album. It's two favorite pieces of Tchaikovsky's played by the world class Royal Philharmonic Orchestra - one of Britain's oldest and most famous organizations. It's conducted by one of the great violinists - and occasional grammy award nominated conductor - Yehudi Mennuhin. Unfortunately, I haven't had time to finish screening this one and I'm not sure the download at either speed is clean. I'll try and finish it tonight, but I don't know if I'll get a chance to post tomorrow and, even if I do, it's period will be up tomorrow. So you might want to do a "just in case" download.

The pieces are the rousing Marche Slave (Slavic March) - written for a benefit for Serbian soldiers wounded in a war against Turkey that Russia later joined (and which incorporates the former Russian National Anthem, "God Save the Tsar") - and one of Tchaikovsky's most frequently played pieces - the 6th Symphony - known as the Pathetique (emotional) Symphony.

From what I've heard so far the performances are quite representative - and stirring - which is no surprise, since the RPO's probably played this stuff many dozens (maybe hundreds) of times. Unfortunately, I haven't heard much that's 100% clean, yet, so this may be only useful to anyone that's filtering them (and has found a filter that works on these!).

Posted 13 years ago #
watcher13
Member

Quickly, if you downloaded the Tchaikovsky, my results were somewhat frustrating. The 192 version of Marche Slave didn't have much garbling, but I swear there's a CD skip. The 128 has at least one garble, but Audacity irons it out as soon as it opens it. I'm going to save that as a new file, but that will add a little loss.

The symphony is pretty frustrating. The 1st 3 movements in both versions are pristine - and I really like the performance - but the last movement has a least one bad glitch in both versions that Audacity won't take out.

Sigh!

Posted 13 years ago #
watcher13
Member

Frittered away my time today, so real quickly. Orinthos pointed out to me in a PM that the digital garbling I'm talking about are almost certainly ripping errors. To clarify Audacity some of these out as soon as it opens them. Then you can save the cleaner copy to another file.

I would try all the classical.com downloads this week.

Posted 13 years ago #

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