Thanks Dave - always loved Bach and Handel - but wasn’t until you recommended the Goebel box that I understood how rich and exciting the Baroque period is. Telemann, Heinichen, Couperin, Hasse, Leclair, Biber, Buxtehude, Vivaldi - it goes on and on😊

I think many of us had initial problems with the Baroque. Leonard Bernstein generously shared his childhood struggles with Bach's music in one of his Omnibus programs. Apart from some popular baroque pieces such as Handel's Messiah and Bach's Badinerie, it was decisive when I got to study Bach's Das Wohltemperierte Klavier. This love has been strengthened and deepened in the 52 years since.

I too was a kid in the 1960s, but in high school I took a course in "Music Appreciation" and we covered everything from Gregorian chant on forward. I recall one part of the exam in the course was the teacher playing music for us and we had to identify the period of the composition. Anyway, during the course we listened to endless pieces listening for the interweaving contrapuntal melodies. And I really began to appreciate it all. Maybe it was Purcell's Trumpet Voluntaries that sealed the deal.

I couldn't have had a more different exposure to Baroque. In the early 80s I was starting to get interested in electronic music that was dominated by synthesizers. I found the harpsichord quite similar so it was it that drove me to listen to Baroque so they.weren't banging around in the background to me!!!! 😁

My intro to baroque music was Vivaldi - the Four Seasons, and Bach's Brandenburg Concerti - then some of the big choral things like Handel's Messiah and Bach's B minor Mass and some of the more better-known cantatas, and some Vivaldi stuff like his Magnificat and settings of the Stabat Mater. When I first was getting into it, it felt very much like I was dutifully eating my brussels sprouts - but eventually I grew to appreciate it - and even branched out to Corelli and yes, by extension, Geminiani, and Pergolesi, et al. My experience of Baroque music isn't all that wide to this day - and I have to admit it has only ever been a curiosity exercise for me. I felt I needed a grounding in it to better understand the music that came later. To this day, it's not music I particularly gravitate towards and tend to approach it in a self-consciously deliberate way. Sir Thomas Beecham apparently despised the harpsichord. He descibed the sound of it as "two skeletons copulating on a tin roof".

Thanks, Dave, for this fascinating and amusing narrative. Usually your path of "discovery" and mine run uncannily parallel, but this is an exception. As I have related previously, my parents were music lovers whose tastes ranged from Haydn to Stravinsky. They particularly doted on Viennese classicism. Mozart and Beethoven were often on the turntable when I was a small child. As for Baroque, my father rarely listened to it, and I suspect that, being a (non-observant) Jew, he had a particular animus against Christian liturgical music of the period. My mother, a lapsed Baptist, definitely knew and loved Handel's Messiah, but that was about it. Interesting that very early on I "discovered" Baroque music, and developed a particular affinity for it totally on my own. My first encounter with it was Casals' Prades Festival recording of the Cello/Keyboard sonatas 1 & 2. That was, I believe, the only Bach recording in my father's collection. For some reason it spoke to my childhood brain so deeply I couldn't stop playing that recording, much to the chagrin of my parents. Later on, after the divorce, my mother encouraged my newfound enthusiasm for Bach, which soon began to expand outward to Handel and Vivaldi, backward to Purcell, Monteverdi, Schütz and others. I enjoyed hearing harpsichord and organ, viola da gamba, recorder, baroque trumpet, the whole bestiary of Baroque instruments. I think some of my youthful enthusiasm for the Baroque can be explained by my being a child of the so-called "Baroque Revival" that began in the Fifties and continued into succeeding decades, eventually merging into the "period instrument" movement. As a child growing up in that milieu (largely a creature of recorded music), I became an inveterate explorer of the Baroque via such labels as Vanguard, Westminster,and Vox which provided us with all sorts of then-obscure repertoire. To this day, Baroque styles constitute my musical "baseline" though I have long since developed more catholic tastes. It will be interesting to see how you, Dave, discoverd Bach and Handel. I will stay tuned.

There is only one year between us and my story is more or less the same. At 20 I started to discover classical music but, like you, only the romantic composers. When I heard baroque music I was very quickly bored. Everything sounded the same and all at the same volume, hardly any dynamics. A friend who did not like romantic music because it had dynamics, liked baroque because it was ideal elevator music for studying, to him it was like house music etc. It just played on without any differentation. I avoided baroque music for a long time but the Brandenburg Concerti and Vivaldi's Four Seasons (!) drew me in slowly. I now like some composers like Locatelli and prefer concerti and chamber music best. When I listen to liturgical vocal music I never look up the lyrics but just enjoy the sound. Thanks for your ongoing series of interesting talks.

Horowitz's famous 1965 Scarlatti album - especially his performance of the Sonata in A minor, K. 54 - was the first baroque music that captivated me. (Aside: Funny how Russian pianists, more recently Pletnev and Sudbin, seem to get Scarlatti, considering that we typically think of the Russian piano school as romantic.)

Wow, what battle it was for you. For me it was no problem. Quite simple: apart from Bach and Vivaldi (both whom I greatly adore and have a large collection of) and Handel and bit of Corelli I just ignored the rest of Baroque. No struggle to try and like it. Only now after more than 35 years of listening to classical music have I slowly started to expand my Baroque horizon. A few months ago I decided to give Telemann a go, listening to a huge collection Telemann recordings on KZfaq. What a pleasant discovery that was!! Since then I have added quite a number of recordings of Telemann' s excellent music to my collection. Still adding more Baroque for me always be a slow process, ONE COMPOSER AT A TIME

I learned about classical music in the 60s and 70s. My introduction to the baroque was Glenn Gould. I’m not sure what the first recording that I picked up was, but eventually I bought everything I could find where Glenn Gould played Bach. No annoying harpsichord there! I eventually branched out to the Bach Cantatas and Vivaldi, and much later I bought the Bach 2000 CD monster box, about $1,000 if I remember correctly. But to be honest, I skimmed the baroque, I know next to nothing about all of those Italian baroque composers. I once saw a quiz titled “is it a pasta or a composer?” I didn’t do very well. P.S. I think I did well to pick up baroque music, as my parents had next to none in the house. My mother called baroque music “sewing machine music.”

In the late 1950's when I was a teenager, on WNYC-AM, there was Dekoven, who played music that he considered OTW (out of this world) or super-OTW. His love for baroque and rococo music was infectious, the way yours is. I couldn't help but be persuaded. Later on, it was Bach and other Germans like Heinrich Schutz. (That's what we listened to, Heinrich Schutz and Prokofiev.)

It is now over 50 years ago but I still remember that when I first started buying lp records two albums of baroque music were among the very first records I bought. The works in question were Handel's Water Music and a couple of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. I was twelve years old at the time and knew very little about music. I had no reason for buying those lp's other than that they were very cheap, part of a budget priced label called Classics for Pleasure if I remember correctly. In those days I only listened to the same music as my schoolmates and friends listened to, which was some kind of bubblegum pop and glamrock that dominated hitlists at the time. I remember now that I actually liked this baroque music precisely because it was so different from the music that was popular at the time.

I had a grade school music teacher that played “Switched-On Bach” when it first came out (late 60s). I bought a copy soon afterwards - the first record that I remember owning .

So, my story with Baroque music is somewhat different than yours Mr. David. I was a rock n roll drummer in high school, playing in local bands [still play today] and was heavily into rock music. But by chance I heard a part of Handel's Water Music and became completely hooked. I didn't know it was Baroque music and didn't know much about classical music at all. But then it was Royal Fireworks Music, Messiah, then the Organ Concertos. I just wanted to know more about that particular music. It was Handel who really got me started on classical music to begin with. From there it just exploded and took on a life of its own, but Handel made me a lifelong Baroqueophile.

I started out on Baroque music, really. I came from a Protestant background, and I loved the hymnody - so finding out that Bach had set some of my favorite hymns may have helped. Truth is, though, I was really introduced the period in a one-two punch: E. Power Biggs organ playing of Bach (I remember the Sinfonia to Cantata 29) and Walter Carlos on the Moog (with that same sinfonia). I loved it. But my first albums bought, back in the 70s, that were not synthesizer performances, were of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (which blew me away) and Handel’s recorder sonatas (which I thought first-rate). My steps out of the Baroque were Haydn, Beethoven, and Grieg - though early on I heard Rimsky’s Le Coq d’Or and thought: ‘why would I ever pay attention to pop music again?’ Perhaps a tad precipitate, but there you are. I had no slogging time in the baroque; I loved it from the first few notes. And it wasn’t long before I went far backwards (Machaut) and forwards (Stravinsky, Bartok, Milhaud, Kirchner), too. What took me time to get into was the Romantic period.

It definitely took me a long time to appreciate Bach and the Baroque. In thinking back, it was sort of a combination of things that kept me away...older "traditional" performances that sounded ponderously slow, with thick textures, etc., newer "HIP" performances that sounded awful to my (uninitiated) ears, and comments like "Vivaldi did not write 500 concertos, he wrote the same concerto 500 times". It was Fischer-Dieskau's singing of Bach BWV 82 with Richter on Archiv (DG) that changed everything for me, and exploring Bach's music has been revelatory. My approach is eclectic, to try and stay open-minded; I pursue both HIP (love Herreweghe) and non-HIP (love Richter), piano as well as harpsichord, etc. Finally got around to Vivaldi and Telemann as well...!, with great performers like Holliger revealing the beauty for me, and for years now, my Sunday mornings are totally dedicated to Bach & Baroque!

Tbh Dave I’ve enjoyed this 15 minute talk about Baroque more than I enjoy listening to it.

@7:50 I can relate analogously to your avoidance of Baroque and Bach because of the antisemitism you experienced even though I am not Jewish. My mom kept pushing and pushing me to take piano lessons and violin lessons even though I have no musical ability. Also, a female music teacher humiliated me in front of the class because I was not talented. Because of these unpleasant experiences, I absolutely avoided having anything to do at all with music for at least ten years. These experiences also fed my hatred of women. Finally, when I was a college freshman and far away from my mother and older sister who were both musically inclined and who were both domineering, I happened to turn on my dormitory room mate's radio while he was gone and became entranced by hearing something by Liszt. I had to admit I liked it and that I liked the music of other classical composers that were played after the Liszt composition. I then had to admit that for years I had been only hurting myself by swearing off listening to classical music. I had been denying myself pleasure. I had associated classical music with being dominated by cruel women. The fact that I am writing this in the first place on this KZfaq channel shows how much I have changed. I am now deeply interested in classical music. My father's second wife was such a different woman from my biological mother that after about a year I realized I had literally become delusional. I had thought all women were bad. Once I became aware that I believed this absurdity, the delusion was broken in an instant.

Yeah, we had the usual Messiah and major Bach stuff growing up-some records, yes, but also a very good AM classical station in the DC area. However, the first time I was exposed to something OTHER than the four war horses of the late Baroque was in my high school band room and later junior college band room where there were copies of Telefunken and Archiv Das Alte Werk records. They had no fancy record covers, just straight information about composers I had never before heard of. Who were Zelenka, Fux, Bertali, Biber, Banchieri, Buonamente, Schulz, Scheidt, Schmelzer, Speer, and others? At the junior college I began lessons from a trombone teacher who got his Ph.D. upon accessing the archives of the Kromeriz castle, somehow gaining permission to enter a then-Communist country, and my early Baroque interest expanded. Anyway, the Archiv and Telefinken recordings fascinated me, WERE historically informed and performed, and opened a whole new sound and composition world to my still-young ears. Now whenever I hear a late-Baroque recording over the air, I often exclaim to myself, “OO, OO…..sounds like a natural trumpet! He or she must be really good!” I virtually never hear any precursor-Baroque over the air, so I must buy it or go to KZfaq. // P.S. My wife walked down the aisle to the recorded opening bars of Antonio Bertali`s “Ciconia”. Our recessional was Bertali`s “Sonata Leopoldi”. Magnificent beauty. (Now onto Mason Williams’ “Baroque-a-Nova”.)

As a teenager in the late 90s I got into Bach very early on. Bach was practically a new composer at the time. A lot of his works were being recorded in the historically informed manner for the first time. There were fresh, exciting looking new CDs all the time. And the fact that this was the leadup to the 250th anniversary of his death meant that Bach was even more omnipresent. I also, frankly, didn't like a lot of the atmosphere and attitudes of most classical music. The tuxedos, the season tickets, the rich people posturing at each other. Bach's practitioners and fans seemed more casual and "normal" somehow, dare I say it, almost like a jazz crowd. Wearing a jumper and jeans seemed just OK in Bach Land somehow, where the Berlioz-Wagner crowd would probably drop monocles. Speaking of jazz, part of the reason I got into jazz was the similarity in temperament and exuberance in style to Bach. I almost totally abandoned classical music for ages listening to jazz. Now that I am getting back into it, I am deliberately targeting the later eras of classical music more, to explore where I did not go as a youngster. And every time I go back to Bach I am reminded of how different the attitude of the Baroque was; it is improvisatory and spontaneous and without rigid boundaries. I think I will always prefer Bach to any later composer for that reason.

Not surprisingly Vivaldi's Four Seasons was my introduction to Baroque music. Also in the early 80s Fuji Film ran a TV ad using the slow movement of a mandolin concerto by Vivaldi. I remember being so surprized to find out it was not something written directly for the ad but a piece of music from the 1700s. Then of course there was the inescapable Pachelbel's Canon which was everywhere after Ordinary People came out in 1981. It really is a nice harmless piece of music but you can get sick of anything when it is overplayed.

Interesting. I smiled when I heard Dave saying that for him, at first, most interesting music began with Beethoven. For me, of about the same age, it is the absolute opposite : I always considered that most interesting music ended with Beethoven / Schubert. When I heard baroque music for the first time, I immediately felt at home. And it has never changed since. Especially, Handel and Vivaldi are for me the "top of the top" in universal music. The singer Jaroussky said very rightly that Handel and Vivaldi are, respectively, the Bordeaux and the Champagne of music !

I’d say my experience is similar to yours, Dave. Bits of Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Corelli when I was young, and of course the corporate appropriation of this sort of thing as elevator, foyer and telephone hold music. When I got into music, it was pretty much all Haydn/ Mozart/ Beethoven and after.Then, there was this greatly elevated production of baroque cds in the 80s/ 90s, still going really. It’s unbelievable how often you see new recital albums of Handel or Vivaldi or Porpora or similar coming out and I can’t think why there’s such a market for them, however skilled the singers et al. In a sense all this is “new music” to most people and I wonder what’s going on socially to drive it all. I like listening to Handel sometimes, for example, but I can’t sit through more than a few of his da capo arias at a time, and being in an opera house listening to 25 or 30 of them under non-18th century conditions just defeats me. I try and pay attention to what I actually do listen to, rather than what I just “have” and I don’t in practice listen to a lot of baroque things, despite 6 shelves looking at me here. Bach Keyboard music, Rameau, that’s about it, on anything like a weekly basis. I think I like music better when it moves away from the ecclesiastical and aristocratic settings characteristic of the baroque. I prefer, in some ways what 19th and 20th century composers have done in translating the style forwards, anything from Schumann and Brahms to Stravinsky, Hindemith et al. But I’m very aware that there are a lot of people out there who love listening to baroque music all the time

For me, my introduction to Baroque music started with hearing the famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor for organ. I loved it, and my dad bought me an album with that plus the Passacaglia in C minor, and the A minor and E minor Preludes and Fugues. Then I got an album of Bach “hits” which included the Third Brandenburg, the Air from the Third Orchestral Suite, “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring, “Wachet Auf”, the D minor Double Violin Concerto etc. The first complete piece of Bach church music I heard was the Christmas Oratorio. And, while it may not be as musically important as the St Matthew Passion, has some great tunes (the pastoral Sinfonia which begins Part Two is still an absolute favourite). It also spared me from confronting the more ghoulish and problematic aspects of the crucifixion story until I was older. I think it was Wendy Carlos’s “Well-Tempered Synthesizer” album which made me explore more Baroque composers, such as Handel, Monteverdi and Scarlatti. From there I just kept heading backwards, into the Renaissance and the Middle Ages.

Baroque era must have been the easiest and most natural part of all classical music for me to get into. Baroque and late romanticism. Renaissance, classicism, early romanticism and post war stuff are the periods I struggled with or are still struggling with. Then again I was born in 1971 and I got into classical music pretty late in my late 20's.

Dear Dave, thanks for speaking out loud about how you feel about the acoustics of the harpsichord. I very sheepishly or never mention that whenever I listen to harpsichord music, I have to lower the treble on the amplifier and if possible switch to a less bright speaker. You’re right: it is exhausting listening.

I have had a strange fondness for Christmas music since I was young in the early 1960s, so Handel's Messiah was the first baroque work that really moved me. Handel remains a favorite, mostly for his operas. French opera-ballets by composers such as Rameau have become a pleasant discovery in the past 25 years or so, due to their proliferation on recordings by certain early music ensembles. I have, however, never developed much of an appreciation for most baroque instrumental music, including that by Bach and Vivaldi. It still seems rather monotonous to me.

What I loved about the harpsichord was the jangle it made when you banged on the keys. Admittedly, I couldn't take it over the long haul. De gustibus. My love for the harpsichord in other modes began with the Poulenc and Martinů concerti on Supraphon. To this day, however, I generally prefer solo Baroque keyboard works on the piano -- more nuanced.

I'm about 10-15 years older than you, Dave. My experiences were roughly the same about Baroque music. However, I was a chorister and the director was a Bach freak, so I got a fairly deep dive into the cantatas. My Dad was a fan of Rosalyn Tureck, so I knew the Goldbergs and the WTC pretty well. Of course, you couldn't be a proper musical family without at least one recording of the Brandenburgs. Horowitz's Columbia Scarlatti album turned me on to Scarlatti. The only Vivaldi I knew were the Gloria in D and the Four Seasons. My deep dive into the Baroque began in the 70s, when I took up more Vivaldi, non-Messiah Handel, and the wild and wonderful Zelenka (I was a big Ives fan, and Zelenka seemed a kindred spirit). However, I still think a lot of those composers "faceless" - the "Spumonis" and the "Rigatonis." On the other hand, that's probably true of any era.

I also had a very different introduction to Baroque music. I was in junior high and a friend told me about this beautiful music he was singing in church by a guy named Bach. He was probably Protestant, but never mentioned that I had murdered Christ. I biked over to a Korvette’s and bought a Vox box of Gunter Kehr conducting the Brandenburg Concertos and the Violin Concertos. I thought the slow movement of the double concerto was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. A bit later I bought Glenn Gould’s recording of the Well-tempered Klavier, which I also fell in love with. Overall, I was hooked on numerous Baroque composers very early on.

Dear David, Thank you for your honesty in admitting your prejudices (which we all have). To me baroque music or rather J.S.Bach was always a central part of my musical upbringing. Firstly ofcourse his Mathew Passion, which was a yearly returning feast in my early childhood and which I still regard as one of the greatest compositions ever. Later I encountered JSB's 'Klavierwerke', partly by playing the piano myself and partly by way of pianists like Glenn Gould and Swatislav Richter. They introduced me to the suites, the inventions, the wohltemperierte klavier, die kunst der fuge and all those other wonders Bach's inexaustible imagination produced. How you can see this highly varied repertoire as part of a blob is a mystery to me. Later I discovered other wonderful baroque composers who were not at all indistinguishable, such as Haendel, Domenico Scarlatti, Vivaldi and Zelenka. To name but a few. Plain silly to regard these as a blob. And even now, if I was forced to make a choice at gunpoint of which composer stands at the pinnacle of Western music, the choice would without a shred of doubt fall on JSB. Despite Beethoven, despite Mozart, despite Schubert and despite Mahler. And I think many of these great masters would have agreed with me! As to your dislike of the harpsichord / basso continuo in much of the music from the baroque era, I can understand this to a certain extent. The omnipresent harpsichord accompaniment can be a bit clangy and tiring. On the other hand it is no more omnipresent than the percussion that is always present in our present day popular music, from jazz to hiphop. Later era's will maybe also regard this constant overemphasis of rythm in our music as a blob. Kind regards, Pieter from the Netherlands.

I still struggle with baroque..all I hear is sequence sequence sequence cadence rinse and repeat...I knowvtheres more to it but I always called it smurf music..that endless upbeat innocuous cut and paste background music

For me it started with Bach's organ music. Then it was on-again off-again until I heard it played on original instruments. This changed _a lot._ It seemed like this music had been constantly stepping on its toes before and all the interesting effects that the composers obviously intended had been buried deeply in the mix somewhere.

How varied different peoples' perception of music can be. Right from the start I loved baroque music, more so than classical or romantic styles. Bach, Handel, Corelli and others, this was the sound that drew me into classical music as a whole. I loved (and still do) the space and timbres of baroque chamber music. And I never disliked the harpsichord. What I initially didn't enjoy when I was younger were the massed strings of large orchestral work, it all sounded to me like just so much tepid soundtrack schmaltz.

Switched-On Bach. That's what my intro was. Not very original. But yes, you rarely even heard Bach on the 60's and 70's radio stations outside of maybe the Brandenburgs. I think in the 50s even Telemann probably got more airplay. When Gould sold big with the Goldberg Variations that was a huge deal -- it was like experimental music.

Messiah all the way, every Christmas, but it was an isolated experience for me because I was really into anything from what Conrad Osborne calls E19 (Mozart through Puccini and Strauss). But by college, I had Britten's ECO Brandenburgs and a Nonesuch lp of Vivaldi Mandolin and Guitar concertos. That must have sold very well, it got a lot of airplay and several people I knew had copies too. When RCA released the NYCO recording of Handel's Julius Ceasar with Sills, Treigle cond. Rudel, the penny dropped and I became a Handel nut. Gosh, hes more than just the Messiah! I also discovered that Bach and Handel were as different in their own time as Wagner and Verdi were in theirs. And I'd have preferred Handel as a dinner companion.

I am probably in the minority, but I have always enjoyed the harpsichord when it is playing continuo. I do have my time limits with it as a solo instrument. When I was younger I always wanted to hear pieces written for the harpsichord on that instrument, but public radio always seemed to play piano versions. I think I had some luck finding a few LP harpsichord recordings from the public library, but there weren't many.

Dave, any chance you can remember which post it was in which you gave that illuminating tutorial on Baroque vs. Classical in terms of their being rhetorical and dramatic modes? I've looked high and low but can't seem to pin it down. Even though it was a rather extended comparison, I almost think it was a sort of digression in a video not focused precisely on a baroque piece of music. In any case, it's one I often feel like revisiting but can't find my way to. Any help would be great.

Broadly similar to your beginnings. Only I never got past the "chaotic amorphous blob" stage. That's not for lack of exposure. I tried. Again, and again, and again I tried. Quite a bit I can sit through without anyone noticing I'm bored to tears. Some of it (actually: loads of it - the reason being prominent continuo or presence of organ) I will run away screaming from. And bits I love dearly. Scarlatti (if played on the piano) and... erm. no, Scarlatti is it. Like serialism, it is a branch I have decided to not put more of my valuable time into. I'll stick to post-Baroque, pre-Bartók (though that latter border is just glib and not realistic and not true, datewise, though the sentiment isn't far wrong).

Switched On Bach got me to explore the “real” versions.

Fue cuando tenía 9 o 10 años cuando mi viejo trajo las cuatro estaciones de Vivaldi. Lo escuché y a la final nunca supe quien lo interpretó.

Is it baroque? I didn’t barake it.

The first classical composer that I rigorously explored was Bach. That experience piqued my interest in baroque music in general. To this day, Bach remains my favorite composer by far and baroque music one of my favorite genres of classical music that I still listen to a lot. My exploration of classical music generally followed a chronological order first starting with baroque, then gallant and classical, then romantic and finally 20th century music. The late romantic, with a few exceptions, is my least favorite genre (I find Tchaikovsky boring). I am somewhat of a heretic when it comes to baroque music performance in that I never warmed up to the HIP on period instruments movement that took off in the 80s and that now so completely dominates the genre that it has become virtually impossible (unacceptable?) to hear it performed any other way. Of course, there are some decent period instrument ensembles and artists out there but I still generally prefer my baroque music played by talented artists using modern instruments (I make an exception for French baroque music because exploration and performance of that genre didn't really get going until the 80s). I'll take I Musici or the English Chamber Orchestra or the Capella Istropolitana over the Academy of Pseudo-Ancient Flatulence any day of the week.

This past year has been my self-directed, Hurwitz-guided intro to 18th/19th c. instrumental/sacred/lieder classical music, having been an opera guy for 20 years. Baroque earned my respect straightaway b/c it began life as a departure from opera and is the formal foundation of so much that came later. I return to it often to get back to the basics, melodic and otherwise, and have slowly but steadily become an ardent admirer of Bach, after overcoming a few initial resistances. For example, the bc harpsichord no longer bothers me (though I'm convinced it's no accident that Pinnock buries his low in the mix). That said I can't seem to warm to the (for the most part) bland, generic slow movements sandwiched between the expressive sprightly movements, especially in Vivaldi. Which is a non-issue in his sacred stuff.

When I was first discovering Classical music, Bach always had an enormous appeal-much more than music by Classical period composers. The reasons for this were twofold: 1. I am what you, Dave call a “chord guy.” The harmonies in the Baroque-lots of sevenths, non chord tones (especially suspensions), diminished sevenths, and the many movements in minor keys, etc. I found (and still do) far more interesting than much of Mozart and Beethoven where the harmonies are often, frankly (dare I say it?!) boring, sometimes predictable, I, vi, ii6, V, I or with Beethoven I-V over and over, lots of filigree scales, etc. (Haydn, though, always seemed more interesting somehow, less predictable harmonically and interesting shifts and surprises). I know many find Baroque sequences boring, but they usually have cool chords and 2. Baroque music has really cool counterpoint, fugues, moving bass lines, plus all the great choral music that you and others don’t like. I will say that over the years Mozart and Beethoven have finally grown on me, but the harmony thing is still sometimes an issue. I still want to jump over from Baroque to the Romantic. That Enlightenment aesthetic is still difficult for me-it still seems emotionally stifled. The Baroque seems much more emotional and rich. I’ve always felt at home there, with the caveat that I prefer to hear only the best-Bach above all, especially the cantatas-the MUSIC Dave, the MUSIC, is mind-blowing in its emotional impact, then Handel (so great) and some others. So there I said it.

To some extend I share your view regarding the harpsichord. I complete dislike solo harpsochord music, but greatly enjoy Bach's keyboard concertos when played on harpsichord, although it always sounds better on the piano. However, the keyboard instrument I dislike the most, by far, is the FORTEPIANO- for me the most pathetic sounding instrument ever. It just blows my mind why anyone will want to listen to late classical period and early romantic period music on such an instrument rather than a modern piano. Can't hear it sounds terrible?