Please suggest a few really good classical recordings


After a somewhat scary number of years attending all sorts of musical performances ranging from avant garde jazz to Broadway shows to folk to pop to rock & roll to zydeco in every conceivable venue, we finally had the great good fortune to experience the Cleveland Symphony at Severance Hall this past Saturday.

While we've enjoyed Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Holst, Ravel, Stravinsky, Strauss and Tchaikovsky recordings, we'd never had an opportunity to listen to a live orchestra before.  This particular performance was of Sibelius' 1st with Susanna Malkki conducting, so as authentic as could reasonably be expected.  We quickly realized that the classical recordings we have simply don't do the material justice.

I have some MFSL, MasterWorks and Deutche Grammaphon pressings along with a few CDs of classical music.  To my ears, none of them really compared very well with pressings by those companies or others (Sheffield and various Japanese houses) of acoustic jazz, folk or rock.  Having read several comments here indicating that most classical recordings are not as good as they could be, I now finally understand why.  The basis of comparison was simply not there before.

So, please suggest a few recordings that might be worthy of the material.  Vinyl would be preferable, but CD or SACD are also fine.  Stuff we know really well includes the Brandenburg Concertos, Beethoven's 9th, Holst's Planets and Stravinsky's Firebird.  Those would be easiest for us to really grasp what we've been missing, but finding a great recording or three is the priority.  Thanks in advance and we look forward to your suggestions!
effischer

Showing 1 response by artemus_5

About 15 yrs ago, while picking vinyl in a thrift store, I encountered a man who said he had a lot of classical records to sell. I was just getting back into vinyl and so I looked. Long story short, I ended up buying about 800 albums, all classical. They were all in NM condition and had the markings on them showing that they had been in a library. Thus NM. Mostly all imports. Philips Denmark?, London UK Gramaphone,  Terlefunkin Mercury, I figured I might learn to like classical music...so I bought them. Truth be told, he had nowhere to store them properly and so they were in the garage.. The moisture had not started doing its damage yet. But I know it would soon if I didn't rescue them. I like some of them but I'm really a classic rocker at heart. But I love to hear those who are knowledgeable , talk about the different renditions and  composers. Guess I'm weird that way.

BTW, I think it was audio asylum which had a thread listing the must have classical records. I have a print out of it. But I'm pretty sure it was 15 or so years ago. You may search there and see if it appears.