Letting the Adagio work its magic.

I am sitting here surfing the net, reading other blogs, browsing books on Amazon and catching up on friends news on Facebook. The whole time I am doing this I am listening to a classical collection called ‘Adagio’, which as its title suggests is a compilation album of various well known Adagios from various composers.

I wasn’t aware until reading a review of the album online that Adagio derives from the latin word for ‘at ease’, but I can certainly believe it as the music plays soothingly behind me.  It has been a busy and at time stressful couple of weeks, which explains my sporadic posting here and it helps to have music like this to calm things down and help lower my blood pressure.

In the past I liked a bit of rousing classical music and at one point I was of the opinion that if it didn’t have guts and bombast then it wasn’t worth listening to.  As you can imagine Wagner and Beethoven featured very highly on my classical listening lists.  Maybe I am mellowing, but I enjoy more soothing, reflective classical music now and today’s compilation fit’s the bill perfectly.

I initially found baroque music too twee, opera too screechy and choral music overpowering, but as I tune my ear in I can appreciate and even come to love elements in all of these types of classical music.  I especially love opera now and will happily spend an afternoon immersed in an opera as I read along with the translation and feeling the emotions imparted.

I guess like with heavy metal and gradually tuning in your ear in so you go heavier and heavier and with jazz so you find it less scattered and wild, you just need time to acclimatize and appreciate what the music has to offer.

I guess this is a long winded way of saying I am enjoying the Adagios I am listening to today and they are helping soothe my mind and unwind before it all starts again on Monday.  If you are new to classical music I would say this album makes a good introduction and if you already have a wide and varied collection, it still makes for beautiful listening and it is good having these pieces collected in one place