Reddit reviews Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker - Complete Ballet
We found 3 Reddit comments about Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker - Complete Ballet. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Shrink-wrapped
The one complaint I have about this is that many of these pieces deserve to be listened to in their entirety. I don't generally like Germanic operas - and listening to the entire Ring Series from Wagner would take something like 9 hours - and even then there are relatively few songs that stand out to me. With that in mind, I'd like to first thank you for putting this up and add just a bit to what you've already listed. I've tried to find some of the best recordings I can, which are often very cheap from Amazon if you buy them used.
Carmen is one of the very best operas, but that's for another discussion. You really can't go wrong with anything from Bizet.
Also Sprach Zarathustria is an entire work. The piece most commonly known from 2001: A Space Odyssey is merely the first piece.
Carmina Burana most certainly belongs in this list, as its signature piece (O Fortuna) is frequently used for a cheap dramatic effect.
I am fairly certain the band name "Modest Mouse" is a direct reference to a classical composer, Modest Moussorgsky.
Numbers listed refer to the track number in the listed album.
Album/Work|Composer|Notable examples
:----|:----|:----
Peer Gynt Suite | Edvard Grieg | 1 - Morning Mood, 4 - In the Hall of the Mountain King
The Nutcracker | Tchaikovsky | 3 - March, 19 - Waltz of the Flowers, 22 - Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy
Carmen / L'Arlésienne Suites | Georges Bizet | 1 - Les Toréadors, 2-3 - Prelude / Aragonaise, Habanera
Also Sprach Zarathustria, bonus: The Planets | Richard Stauss, bonus: Holst | 1 - Einleitung or Sonnenaufgang (prelude or sunrise), 10 - Mars, the Bringer of War, 12 - Mercury, the Winged Messenger
Carmina Burana | Carl Orff | 1 & 25 - O Fortuna, 6 - Tanz, 15 - Amor Volat Undique
Pictures at an Exhibition / Night on Bald Mountain | Modest Moussorgsky | 12 - The Great Gate of Kiev, 16 - Night on Bald Mountain (Fantasia version)
Rimsky-Korsakov: Greatest Hits | Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov | 1 - Flight of the Bumblebee, 10 - Procession of the Nobles, 6 - Fandago Asturiano
I might suggest, if you want a stirring performance with clarity in the orchestral texture, the complete ballet, Valery Gergiev conducting the Kirov Orchestra. Gergiev is always topnotch when it comes to interpreting Tchaikovsky...
Depends on the music and whether you originally ripped to MP3 or AAC. A couple of years ago, I ran a test on my $10k home system where I ripped a couple of well-recorded songs to MP3, AAC, and Apple Lossless Encoder (ALE); burned them back to a CD; and took a listen.
The 128 kbps MP3 sounded obviously compromised. Cymbals sounded like bursts of white noise and the soundstage collapsed. 128 kbps AAC sounded surprisingly good, with some loss of dynamics and congestion during complex passages. I don't think that I could reliably tell the difference between 256 kbps AAC and ALE. Maybe on tracks from albums recorded with the quality of this one.
If you're listening to highly processed rock recordings, then 128 kbps AAC is just fine. For audiophile-quality classical albums, you likely want to bump up to 256 kbps AAC or better.
Make a test CD and listen for yourself. The V6s are very detailed headphones and should let you hear the difference. You'll learn more from an hour or two of your own experiments than in a day of talking to people.