1. 友人询问“英国法国的音乐可否介绍一二? 还有，以春子和和夏的年纪，你们给他们听交响乐吗？... ”
春永：1). Great English composers: in the pre-baroque and early baroque one might think of e.g.Thomas Tallis (c. 1505-1585), William Byrd (c.1540-1623), John Bull (c. 1563-1628) (all of these Catholic). In the
baroque period the most famous English composer, and indeed a very
great one, is Henry Purcell (1659-1695), but there were again quite a
number of very good composers (e.g. Purcell's teacher John Blow,
1649-1708). The music of all of these composers is quite recognizable
as English, difficult though it may be to explain how.
Recommendations: it always depends on the performance. Hard to find
good performances.
Try to find for instance Byrd's music for gamba-consort and his songs
(usually for voice and gambas); Purcell's famous short opera Dido and
Aeneas; Blow's beautiful Ode on the Death of Mr. Henry Purcell
(a good recording by the Kings Consort, with the counter-tenors James
Bowman and Michael Chance, on a cd of Countertenor duets and solos by
Purcell and Blow, recorded almost 20 years ago; here is a link to the
cd at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Counterten ... m_cr_pr_product_top
; this cd is very worth listening to).
2). In the Baroque period French music was also very great, and has
its own distinct style.
Some of the great composers: Louis Couperin (c. 1626-1661), his nephew
François Couperin, Marin Marais, Jean-Phillipe Rameau (1683-1764).
3). The symphony is a relatively late form, on the whole associated
with a marked decline in Western music at the end of the eighteenth
and in the nineteenth century, and I don't think we've played any
symphonies for the children.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HeasqkO1Ko
(Helen Morgan, an American singer, sings a song with words by P.G.
Wodehouse, one of the best English writers of the 20th century, and music by Jerome Kern,
perhaps the best of the composers of musical comedies in the early
20th century).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXf8pmam-64
(Handel aria sung by a great Irish tenor, John McCormack; here he is
in his fifties, and his voice not as glorious as it was fifteen or twenty years
earlier, but there is still great beauty about his singing, and his diction is excellent.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ScEdZw4edc
(another Handel recording by John McCormack, here younger, and, though
the recording quality is therefore a bit worse, much more beautiful yet.)