classical music for beginners
classical music is about as wide a field as "20th century music", so it would be a bit hard to gather a really good list. But I'll try... more or less, classical music has 5 big periods, very different from each other. The best thing would be to listen to a few things from each period and decide what's your favourite: 1 - ancient music meaning basically everything done up to the baroque period. It's quite hard to relate to when you don't have good music foundations. 2 - baroque Biggest names here would be Bach, Händel and Vivaldi, at least for the time being. The easy listening pieces would be: Bach's 2nd suite (with the flute solo) Bach's Cantatas Albinoni's adagio Vivaldi's four seasons and Händel... just pick an oratory 3 - classic Here it's basically 3 names: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Mozart's 21st piano concerto is a good start Beethoven is probably an even better start, even though it's not my cup of tea: 5th and 9th symphonies moonlight sonata or the pastoralia. 4 - romantic and here it gets a bit harder. You should first decide what kind of genre you're interested in. Since Iäm more for the solo and chambre music, that's what you're going to get. names here, by the way, are Chopin, Schumann, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Rachmanninof, Brahms, Grieg and quite a few others. I would advise to start with Chopin's ballades, probably the first. Then take Grieg, Peer Gynt and the piano concerto. Schubert is probably the easiest to approach with chambre music and Schumann is just not easy to approach. Brahms... try the Opus 118 for piano solo, it's wonderfully entertaining. Tchaikovsky is easiest with the nutcracker and rachmanninof? gee... who would have thought I'd recommend this to anyone. but then again... 2nd piano concerto. and 5 - modern or early 20th century. Should start with Debussy and Ravel (french impressionists, Faure, Poulenc and Frank as well) and then move to the Russians, meaning Shostakovitch, Stravinsky, and the Hungarians - Bartok and Kodaly. Well... it was a very short "easy listening" list, but it's a start. g'luck
