Hoo boy. You did ask.
I've got a number of these.
My personal favorite wait-for moments, however, rarely can be expressed in written word. They're usually musical passages (like the swell after "I get up I get down in CTTE). This is by no means exclusively the case, but tends to follow in this theme.
They include:
From
The Great Nothing by Spock's Beard:
The musical passages leading up to and surrounding:
"The boy's got potential, but he's never had commercial success...."
and
"The boy has no potential, and he'll never have commercial success...."
etc. The drum work in there is impeccable and the keyboard work that surrounds it is phenomenal. My favorite part of a well engineered song from one end to the other. They have mastered the fact that the silences between the notes are as important if not more so than the notes themselves. A piece of musical engineering on the scale of the Boeing 747 or the world's great bridges: an awesome experience.
From
Grendel by Marillion:
Start at one end, work your way through. A masterful work in dynamics and imagery. It starts out very darkly and gets darker as the song goes on. "Preistly heads bow in shame..." "Mother Nature's Bastard Child, shunned by leaf and stream" But my very favorite cheeck clenching moment is toward the end when Grendel declares that he's had enough of their "Ugly pale skin and their putrid green eyes", their "Pretty Pretty speeches" and "all their viscious slander". That entire segment is my favorite. It takes the rage of a much maligned monster and focuses it directly where it belongs.
I tend to start gnawing the furniture about then, and the kids know to stay out of the way, as they know they're crunchy and good with ketchup.
Another wonderfully engineered song that mixes the human voice with keyboards, percussion and strings to make an epic of, well, epic proportions.
From
Mundus Incompertus by Par Lindh Project
This more classicly based chart is one of those that I'd mentioned earlier -- they don't really have any vocals from which to anchor my preferences. They also have grasped the concept that silence can be used as a musical tool. The wind-up to a dead stop right before unleashing the organ and percussionry sends a chill down my spine. This chart is filled with them. I'd give anything to be able to see it performed live. They MUST have more than one drummer as with the amount of work that's in this piece would leave one mortal human exhausted about half way in.
From
The Firebird Suite by Igor Stravinsky
This piece, out of a very wide library of classical music, likely personifies what Progressive Rock is to me. I feel that it's a shame that someone like Par Lindh Project or perhaps a group involving Martin Orford doesn't take this one on and arrange it for a more modern ensemble. Specifically the Bercuse and the Finale, the final two movements of this wonderful suite. Starting off with a haunting bassoon feature, with visualizations of misty glades, full moons, and other stuff that tends to make the hair on the back of my head stand on end, following into a French Horn feature (that, incidentally, helped my high school orchestra win the 1982 California state orchestral championships, and about the only song that would ever put a French Horn in my hands again) that could easily be the most haunting pieces of "slowly waking up" musical imagery that's been recorded (or at least heard and/or played by me). See the beginnings of Siberian Khartu (yes, Rick, I know it's "Khatru" or whatever. I like it better this way. Deal.) on Yessongs for an example of this.
But the finale. Oh my, the finale.
There are very few songs I can actually say this about with a straight face: If your ears aren't bleeding after they're done, it's NOT LOUD ENOUGH. Designed with brass musicians in mind, this was actually my first experience with non-standard (ie non 2, 3, or 4) time signatures, and was one of the defining moments of an otherwise unmemorable high school career. During the final concert of the year, we borrowed heavily from the marching band, arming them with such extravagances as sixteen marching french horns, twelve marching euphoniums, twenty four bell-front tubas and eight contrabass bugles. The sight of a four measure bell up gave my parents enough warning to put in the earplugs. The risers we were sitting on actually recoiled two inches simply from the opening note. We had a recording made of the concert. You could actually hear someone say "Oh shit" when the horns came up.
It was fucking GREAT!
There are others, but I believe I've spewed on long enough. I heartily congratulate anyone with the fortitude to wade through it this far.
Roger -Dot- Lee, "Of all the pains in asses, he's the worst I've had the bad taste to know"