I completely agree. I've mostly given up on buying/collecting recorded pieces and save my classical music money for live performances. They are infinitely better than virtually any recorded piece. And you are also right about the age thing, I usually feel like I'm visiting an old folks home when I go to the concerts. I hope local orchestras find a financially viable way to continue to have live performances in the next 20-30 years.

Welcome to the incredibly diverse and actually “unscratchable” world of classical music. Seriously, there’s just so much that you will never run out of something new to listen to!

One thing to realize when you start out is that different conductors/musicians can greatly change the overall experience of a song due to things like the way it’s played or the speed it’s played at. Beethoven’s 5th symphony sounds very different from these two conductors and orchestras Karajan vs Klemperer. So if you find yourself greatly disliking a particular piece, try listening to it with a different musician, or conductor, or orchestra, etc it can make a HUGE difference.

I’ve thrown together a quick list of some of my favorites from the “big 3” plus a few others to get you started. There’s just so much out there, that these kinds of lists could go on and on depending on what you like. Any of these pieces could lead you to additional pieces by the same composer or to composers from the same era of which there are many in both cases.

Mozart

Clarinet concerto

Gran Partida

Marriage of Figaro Opera

Great mass in C

Flute and harp concerto

Beethoven

6th symphony

7th symphony

5th piano

Bach

cello suites

The Well-Tempered Clavier

Chopin

nocturnes

Dvorak

9th symphony

Glass

The Hours

Here’s another interesting webpage with a tiny bit of background and some suggestion lists I found useful in my early days of classical music discovery.

Have fun!

WOW, that was OUTSTANDING! Thanks for sharing it

Never knew I liked ANY jazz, thanks for pointing this out I've been enjoying it!

They were great! It just took some time to get through them and then work got in the way of replying.

Me either. Hadn't even heard of them until now.

Wow, thanks for putting all of those together!

Wow, that's quite a crowd you ran into over there :( Thanks for your comments here.

LOL. 26 comments and a bunch of people engaged in an interesting conversation and yet only 1 dot on the Hubski ring?

I'd imagine that would be quite pleasant and enjoyable in person, just like watching reeds in the wind. It does appear to be in dire need of a good oiling though! Thanks for sharing.

There's awesome "modern" art

Ah. I guess a really large news aggregation site then? Maybe one with lots of "subgroups" for certain topics?

Shhh... Don't tell others on here I encouraged this: https://www.reddit.com/r/postcapitalism/

Maybe? I've done a little art history, but I already have too many interests and not enough time. There seems to be such an insurmountable number of paintings (and art in general) that I already DO enjoy, that willfully adding to that number seems crazy :) Every time I learn a little about another form of visual art (historical, cultural, etc), my trips to museums become that much more unwieldy! Seriously, I could probably live in some of them and not tire of wandering through the halls (not to mention the back catalogs).

Funny you should ask: https://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/photogallery/official-portraits-us-presidents

However: http://change.gov/newsroom/entry/new_official_portrait_released/ Will Obama have a painted one too?

I second the request for "some pieces of modern art that really struck you." I've tried many times in several museums and always feel like I wasted my time and money.

Personally, the abstract modernist line of art really doesn't do anything for me or the "rocks" or other "shock" art. But I think a lot of this art comes from continuing to push into new creative territories. Imagine if you were an artist and all you could do was use the same style as everyone else had for the last 2000 years? We had a whole discussion about this a couple of weeks ago. I used to enjoy amateur photography for several years, but then google images came out and I realized I could find virtually any picture I ever wanted to take had already been taken by someone with a lot more time and experience. So for me I just didn't bother anymore and moved on, but real artists don't do that. And this same kind of thing happens with writing, visual arts, music, literature, etc. Art must continue to change or it just gets boring, for the artist and the admirer. Plus, almost all the famous artists who created new forms of art were disliked in the beginning.

And don't be misled by the "professors" suggestions that the impressionists were somehow an "objectively" aesthetic and accepted group. They were completely rejected by the established art scene when they first started their work. Their work was seen as lazy, imprecise, and just plain terrible too. Now they command some of the highest prices for any art in the world. And in terms of some modernist art, "aesthetically pleasing" is not the point and it requires a learned understanding of its purpose, historical place, context, etc in order to "get it." And to suggest that Jackson Pollock was some kind of simpleton who lacked a philosophical foundation is an insult. He was continuing on the line of creative artistic development that had come before him, but also trying to add his own self to it so to speak.

In the end though, I do enjoy classical works more though :) Maybe that's just because they are "easy" to enjoy, but who is going to tell me that I can't enjoy them? (I do however enjoy "difficult" works of art in other areas of the arts, so there isn't any consistency for me either)