Sal's Snippets: Classical music

Do you enjoy classical music? I do! In fact I’ve always loved most types of music.

When I was 7, I was ‘forced’ to have piano lessons. I say ‘forced’ because I really wanted ballet lessons but as my dad had been such a proficient pianist, it was decided that I should follow in his footsteps..(or fingertips!)

I went, each week, to a piano teacher called Mrs Westaway, who lived locally and she was very pleasant. The only problem was that I had to practise regularly and I didn’t always feel like doing it! I’d sometimes stubbornly sit at the piano and refuse to play! However, I must’ve done enough to impress her as she put me forward for my first exam. Being allowed the time off school, off I toddled with my mum, to a house in Torquay and believe it or not, I achieved an ‘Honours’ grade!

This continued and I wasn’t too bad at playing the piano…until I reached the age of 14 or 15 and then GCE ‘O’ Levels, (as they were in those days)…and not forgetting boyfriends…took over! The piano lessons lapsed but I could play well enough to be able to use the piano in my reception classroom, at the school in Surrey where I first taught.

As well as this, we had daily assembly and it was expected of the teachers, to play classical music as the children entered and exited the school hall…favourites being: ‘ The Carnival of the Animals’ by Saint-Saens; ‘The Planets’ Suite’ by Gustav Holst; Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ and Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’. We had many others too and we had to make sure that the children were told the name and composer of the music that we played. In fact, music played quite a large part in the school week and we were even lucky enough to have a visiting (and superb)music teacher who came into school, daily. Thus, we also entered local music festivals.

I eventually moved to Devon and one day, I noticed in W.H. Smith, a new magazine that came with a classical music CD. It was called ‘The Classical Collection’…

Well, I bought the first issue ( as above ) and I continued to buy them for quite some time.

As for my favourite piece of classical music and composers, there are certainly many candidates and there are far too many to write here but I do enjoy listening to these:

Elgar’s Nimrod (Enigma Variations);

Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2;

Edvard Grieg’s ‘Peer Gynt’ Suite No 1 and No 2; Wagner’s ‘ The ride of the Valkyrie;

Chopin’s Nocturne No 2 in E flat Major;

Holst, ‘The Planets’;

Dvorak’s ‘ New World Symphony’;

Debussy’s Clair de lune, from Suite bergamasque;

Johan Strauss Sr’s ‘Radetzky March’;

Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’;

Tchaikovsky’s ‘Nutcracker’ and ‘Swan Lake’…and Sleeping Beauty!

Ravel’s Bolero;

Mendelssohn’s ‘Fingal’s Cave’;