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Baker's Dozen

Tour De France: Jonathan Meades Selects 13 Exercise Bike Classics
John Doran , March 6th, 2019 09:44

After a recent serious illness, writer and documentarian Jonathan Meades was prescribed 30 minutes a day on an exercise bike. He tells John Doran about his 13 favourite pieces of classical music to accompany his regimen

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Schubert - Quintet For Strings

This is in a completely different mood. Some of it is very, very joyful. It is dreamlike. Oneiric. It doesn’t have the weight and heft and sheer animal power of Beethoven, it’s much lighter but the strangeness is implied by what could be termed its otherworldliness. But then one might say that the ‘strangeness’ is what is the key thing in virtually all important art. Like I said before, it makes you ask why had no one done this before and I guess in Schubert’s case it was because he was waiting for Beethoven to come along and feed him the inspiration.