uphill

sflagel said:

Thanks to all the responses, I will definitely now broaden my horizons and listen intently to BIS recordings.

Excellent!  But also, do try to attend some live classical (and other) concerts. You have nothing to lose and much perhaps to gain.

You might even find some for free. This summer, here in Montreal, there were, among other great free musical events, several free outdoor concerts given by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestre Metropolitain. Attendance was in the 60-75 thousand range for some of them. A standing ovation among that many people is a part of the wonder of classical music that comes rather rarely.

On further use, I note that one aspect of playlists has improved a little. The actual piece or movement being streamed is more or less properly identified. It use to be that the descriptor, for example: "Double Concerto for Violin and Cello: lii. Allegro vivo" is a "song" title in a current Apple Music playlist. Indeed, that's probably the name of the track on the recording. Unlike "Cocaine", which is a distinctive song title that pretty much anyone knows was composed by J. J. Cale, it is not so likely that anyone would easily know who is the composer of "Double Concerto for Violin and Cello: lii. Allegro vivo" It isn't actually a title of a "song", and in fact several composers could have compositions that include this as one of the movements.

Apple Music Classical seems to provide information about who is the composer and which composition is being exerpted even in playlists.

Also, I was able to Airplay from my iPhone to an Apple TV 3rd generation which I use as the source for my audio system because it has an optical audio output that I feed into a DA converter which inputs to  my preamplifier.

Quick first impressions:

1) This app retains the utterly ignorant-of-classical-music method of assembling playlists that was so infuriating with Apple Music. One is presented with the third movement of this followed by the first movement of that, and so on. The people at Apple Music simply view each part of any complex classical composition as a separate, independent "song". It's like reading chapter 3 of one book followed by chapter 12 of another book etc. This ignores the fact that all the movements of a classical composition are actually a whole narrative that loses meaning and context when broken, separated and thrown together randomly.

Clearly, Apple has not hired anyone who actually understands classical music but just people who view it in the paradigm of pop or jazz albums that are indeed collections of "songs" that can generally stand alone as independent pieces.

2) On the positive side, if one avoids the ignorant playlists, it is quite a bit easier to find music by an actual composer or by the name of a composition. A search on "Gotterdammerung" for example yields the actual Wagner opera and not a page of miscellaneous pop recordings that have little or nothin to do with Wagner, or opera.

Don't get me wrong: I listen to and love a wide variety of pop, rock, jazz, World, etc. music. I am just dismayed that Apple, one of the richest and most innovative companies in the history of the World, can't find even one person who understands the important differences amongst various genres of music.

AirParrot has issued an update that is compatible with tvOS 10.2. It works OK for my setup.