The sole reason I don't own/listen to any classical music is because I have no idea where to start. It's not like you can pick up a cd of Beethoven performing Beethoven or Schubert playing Schubert. Which is my predicament.

If I want to get some music from Stravinsky or Tchaikovsky, what do I do? How do I know which ones are good to get? Are there specific orchestras or conductors who are pretty universallly considered to be really great? So that I could just pick up anything they've released and know I'm getting great renditions.

Help.

I'm in the same boat as you.
I did pick up Glenn Gould's 1995 recording of Bach's "Goldberg Variations", though and have been thoroughly blown away by it. If you have any interest in solo piano pieces, my uneducated opinion would be to check this thing out.

Seriously, you can't go wrong with Mozart.



Even people who hate classical stuff love his music. Go with some of the better-known recordings on Deutch-Grammaphone and look for some great conductors like Solti, as well as symphonies from Vienna or Germany. You could start with some of his piano concertos or the brilliant Requiem before diving into some of his operas.


This is a good entry point for an overall sampling of his work:

stop buying so many cds and move out of your mother's house.

I love Mozart. It's like classical trance rock to me.

I recommend getting stuff by more famous orchestra's. I never noticed until I got some Mozart which had cuts from the London Philharmonic as well as some other hugely popular European orchestras. Then I got one from the Philadelphia Symphony and it sounds like garbage in comparison.

'the piano' sdtrk, got me into piano based classical music.

Now do Beethoven

If you're an audiophile, check out Telarc records who are particularly noted for clean recordings.

Also, this is a great way to get into vinyl on the cheap with older classics.

Like someone else said, Deutsche Gramaphone is a good label.

Also, orchestras are like sports teams, they've got golden eras under different conductors. So Eugene Ormandy is always fantastic, and Philadelphia sounded best under him (he's seriously old school), and at that time were the greatest orchestra in the world. VonKarajan and Abbado with Berlin. Fritz Reiner and Solti did great with Chicago. Szell and Dohnanyi with Cleveland. Boston was a great orchestra but Ozawa made them sound like crap. Maazel is outstanding with anyone he conducts, especially Vienna Philharmonic. Also, some conductors are great with opera but not with symphonic literature and vice versa. Walter and Bernstein with New York Phil. I don't care for Levine, Mehta or alot of the conductors who have been in vogue for the last 15-20. Then there are some younger conductors coming up who show a lot of promise, like Michael Tilsson-Thomas, Eschenbach, Confessore...

Then if you don't mind older recordings with fantastic performances, you can find remastered works of some of the old vanguard of great conductors like Toscanini, Furtwangler, Bruno Walter.

Alot of universities and college libraries are ditching their vinyl for cheap or free.

saw/heard him conduct last summer and was blown away. very exciting guy.
can't remember the program off the top of my head. it's in my notebooks at home.

Now on to literature.

Even if you like the conductor, or the orchestra, or both, you may not like the piece, so it helps to have a basic idea of what you like. Like I enjoy alot of Baroque, so I dig J.S. Bach, Haydn, Handel, Telemann, Vivaldi... I'm not hugely into Mozart. He's good, I just never connected as a player, and it's not just him, it's alot of that mid-Classical period. So I'm not hugely into early Beethoven, but the chromaticism that characterizes the Romantic period gets me, so I'm a sucker for Beethoven's later works (say symph. 5 and on, with a special nod to symph. 7. and his piano sonatas are OUTSTANDING).

Not a fan of mahler, huge fan of turn of the century russian composers like Borodin, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, and 20th century Russians like Shostakovitch (symph. 5 finale is a ball buster, it's insanely good). Shostakovitch's string quartets are also awesome.

But it's a matter of taste, so you've got to figure out what you like. I'd recommend checking out the norton anthology of western music and if you can also check it out, it comes with cds. Check out the school of music at your nearest college, it will be filled with nerdy boys who will give you stuff to listen to right there on some headphones.

that is because you are a woman of refined and exquisite tastes, your love of Kraft Cheese and Macaroni notwithstanding.