Peter Goldstein laments: >I realize this may be just a phase, and in a couple of years I'll be >back loving Beethoven. But right now he's a bore--and a loud >and pretentious one at that. > >So--is there anyone out there who has ever felt this? Not with Beethoven - he still has, as Peter once thought, "the dramatic power, the emotional depth, the grandeur, the intellectual rigor" as far as I'm concerned. There was a period of some years when, for a few months and for reasons I can't explain, I just couldn't listen to Brahms (somebody please pass Mimi the smelling salts!) and found him thick, laboured and meandering. Then I'd snap out of it and wonder how on earth I could have felt like that, and mervelled anew at, say, the slow movement of the 4th symphony. Then some months later, I'd go off him again. However, in recent years, I've dug deep into the piano music and the chamber music, and find new aspects of a composer I'm surprised to find is one of my very favourites - I can't imagine him falling out of favour again. However, there are a few individual works that I either never much cared for in the first place or have heard once too often. In the first category are, for example, Mozart's Flute and Harp Concerto and Franck's Symphony. In the second - Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto and Scheherezade. Then there are some warhorses I'd be happy never to hear again - Bolero heads this list. Someone - I think it was Virgil Thomson - once advocated no performances of the Beethoven symphonies for a year to give us the chance to rediscover them. But this is to ignore the fact that - possibly every day - someone is hearing Beethoven 5 for the first time, as all of us listers once did. Richard Pennycuick [log in to unmask]