Classical Music

[steuard]

I do plan to post at least one general "life update" here eventually for the sake of friends looking to see what I'm up to (though my webpage was updated recently, so that may be enough). But in the meantime, let me ask for some advice: where would you go for help in starting a vaguely serious classical music CD collection?

Specifically, I already have some notion of the "first wave" of pieces that I'd like to own, and I know of at least a couple of decent lists of "standard repertoire" to figure out some more early targets. But I don't have any experience at all in choosing which recording of each piece to buy. I don't have time to go to a library and listen to everything under the sun, and I don't want to spend tons of money on this (especially not at first), so I'd like to make sure that every CD I buy is likely to be one I'd be glad to own even if my collection grew really big.

Ideally, what I'd like is a book or perhaps a website that will list two or three excellent recordings of each major piece, and give a three sentence to three paragraph review of that recording that says what makes it great and what isn't quite perfect about it. (For example, I played trumpet in orchestra growing up; if the brass isn't good, I want to know!) If the same resource gave suggestions like "If you enjoyed this piece, try ____", that would be an additional plus, but I can get that elsewhere. Naturally, I'd want reviews that would be reasonably relevant and comprehensible to a novice collector (but one who knows classical music in general somewhat well). Any suggestions?

Finally, I'm inserting a couple of personal links here, not because I think you're all dying to see them but just to put them in a home-made link list on my main journal page. Look if you're interested (or for that matter, comment on how they look at the upper right of my journal page; note that it's not as spiffy in IE).

Science Tolkien Prom King

Edit: Boy, they sure make it tough to create custom journal designs without paying; I didn't expect them to strip the ID on my DIV of links. I think I've worked around it now, anyway. Also, I note that they inexplicably wrap even "Text formatting: None" entries in a <P> tag, at least in my chosen journal style. I can adapt to that. : )

Comments

Yay! Stoose has a blog. :)

[(Anonymous)]

Can't really help you with those CDs, but I'm so happy you have a blog now. :)

Blog vs. Home Page:

I think it's very common to have *both* a blog and a home page.

You talk on the blog, you keep records and stuff on the home page.

I have a blog, (http://lion.taoriver.net/) and you can see that it's linked to my homepage. (http://www.speakeasy.org/~lion/) This is a common arrangement. You've just done it yourself.

Yaaay! Stoose has a blog. :)

If you'd like me to host a WordPress blog (http://wordpress.org/) for you, let me know. I'm fine with that. It's pretty easy to customize. But LJ should be fine, I would think.

-- Lion (http://lion.taoriver.net/)