My two point five year journey into classical music

Since it's only been about two and a half years since I really started understanding and falling in love with classical music, I want to try and remember the route that I took between pieces and composers that spoke to me, and hopefully keep track of how my tastes change in the future. EDIT: After writing a first draft of this post I'm amazed at how much I can remember. This is great, I'd love to know the paths other people took.

The first piece I really "got" was the Saint-Saens Piano Concerto 2. This was on a CD I picked up at the age of 19 or so because I could remember enjoying the Carnival of the Animals on a cassette as a kid. I had it on in the background and suddenly the melody leaped out at me. Looking back that was probably one of the most culturally significant moments my life so far... I can still remember being on my computer in my poorly heated shoebox of a dorm room when it happened.

After that I quickly bought a set of all five piano concertos, and fell in love with 1 and then 4. I tried Rachmaninoff around this time, as everybody raved about him, specifically his piano concertos 2 and 3 - but never really got into them. The melodies were great but there was too much overblown romantic lushness for me to handle.

Then I tried Liszt's piano concertos. I liked them well enough, but not nearly to the startling degree as the Saint-Saens. I was starting to get disillusioned at this point as nothing had grabbed at my insides like the Saint-Saens had. I thought it might be a one off. I also tried Tchaikovsky and Brahms, but didn't get them either. Still too romantically dense and overlush for me.

Then I tried Prokofiev's piano concertos. Wow. Much better.

I lapped up the piano concertos 2 and 3, particularly the former. It gave me chills. The other three concertos were good - not as good as 2 and 3 - but I liked them far better than the other pieces I had tried since S-S.

At this point I decided that I wasn't too fond of the very romantic pieces, and so tried Mendelssohn, who I discovered was a more conservative romantic. I heard his piano trios first, which was the first piece of chamber music I liked. Then I got the Hebrides overture and symphonies 3 and 4, all of which got to me.

This turned me onto symphonies instead of just being a piano concerto , and I asked for a Prokofiev symphony set for christmas. I liked the 1st, and the 5th, but not as much as I had hoped. They didn't satisfy me on as deep as a level as my other favorites.

Then I caught the haunting percussion ending of the Shostakovich Cello Concerto 2 on NPR, and on the strength of that bought it, with the 1st. It was amazing. This became my favorite piece of music - and still is, a year and a half later. I must have listened to it several hundred times. Naturally I got on a Shostakovich kick - I heard the 8th Quartet and bought the set of them. It took me a while to be comfortable with the string quartet form, but I got very into the 8th, 12th, 13th, and 15th. It must have been at this point that I stopped finding very stringy pieces difficult to listen to.

Around this time I started listening to the Prokofiev symphonies again, and discovered that I liked the 6th, 7th and 2nd. Particularly the 2nd. I got a Shostakovich symphony cycle for christmas, and slowly got into the 9th, 11th, 5th, 10th, 13th, 15th, and 7th - in that chronological order. Recently I've been listening to Berg and Schnittke as well.

And that pretty much brings me up to date...