Regular listening

Record buying seems to go through distinct phases for most people.

The early enthusiastic years of experimentation

The consolidation years, building a library of 'key' works by 'major' composers in 'definitive' recordings

followed by

The intrepid seeking out new music years

and/or

The scholarly lots of recordings of the same work period

Within all of this there is, I suspect, a rather small body of works that we actually listen to on a regular basis. Not necessarily our 'favourite' works but the ones that make it down off the shelf at least once a month.

For me, at the moment, and in no particular order these are:

Elgar 1 - usually turns up on a Sunday morning, can't remember version

Mozart & Strauss songs/Christine Schäfer - still my favourite soprano in these works

Strauss Four Last Songs - been into this in detail before but still swapping between Schwarzkopf and Norman. Have also added Te Kanawa which I won't be listening to again and Lisa della Casa which I have yet to play

Wagner - Tristan & Isolde - not often all the way through at present, more likely skipping act 2; the only opera I have in more than one version (happiest with Nilsson on the 1966 Bayreuth but just started with a Furtwängler/Flagstad) and the only one I really miss if I haven't heard it for a while

Bach - currently Gilbert's WTC, before that there were the Goldberg years (Gould then Hewitt) will get back to them I'm sure, maybe even in a harpsichord version!

Grieg and Sibelius songs/Karita Mattila - just wonderful

And I think that's about it, plenty else does get a listen but not nearly so often.

 

In my history (I've been buying recordings for 31 years) the phases seem to have been:

Passions for particular composers, trying to acquire every recorded work (much easier 31 years ago!), and some in multiple versions - at 19, my record collection was about half Richard Strauss (a composer I seem to have outgrown now)... Panathenaenzug, anyone? No, me neither.

"The consolidation years, building a library of 'key' works by 'major' composers in 'definitive' recordings" - yes, I recognise this phase. I used to keep an A4 folder with a page for each composer considered worthy of inclusion, and different coloured inks as recordings I wanted were deleted before I could get round to affording them... but this phase was abandoned long before it approached completion, and I disposed of many of its records long ago. It eventually dawned on me that my collection didn't have to be a library, and that I should never buy anything simply because I thought I ought to own it.

"The intrepid seeking out new music years
and/or
The scholarly lots of recordings of the same work period" - well, I've always wanted multiple versions of favourite works, having realised early on that interpretations critically panned for eccentricity often have something to say about the music that you won't hear elsewhere. And I've always been interested in good music I haven't yet heard. What's particularly pleasing is when you buy a recording because a review or other tip-off suggests that it just might be something you'd like, and it turns out to be right up your street - I've had lots of examples of this, but they are (of course) outnumbered about 10 to 1 by the purchases hopefully made which turned out to be great disappointments.

Now I'm in the "This collection is too big, and desperately needs thinning and focusing on my current interests" phase. Whether this feeling leads me actually to part with any CDs is another matter entirely. My last attempted winnowing produced only a dozen or so candidates for the secondhand shop out of over 1000 discs!

 

I suspect I'm not particularly discerning, because I must say I haven't had all that many disappointments in my explorations to date . To be fair I haven't got too far off the beaten track, with a CD collection not much over half the size of yours and no vinyl at all, but I'd have to say that there's hardly been anything where I've thought 'now why did anyone bother to record that?'. And I suppose my tastes are pretty narrow when you actually look through my collection, as I've just done for a quick and approximate disc-count - I've got about two CDs with music by composers born before Bach, and about five representing all the composers born between Bach and Beethoven

When I was starting out I always found that a reliable guide to how 'important' was a given work was the size of its entry in the Penguin or Gramophone guides, which of course is mainly determined by how many recorded versions are available.

 

I guess I'm with PeteH in not being particularly discerning. I started with Romantic (Beethoven in particular, which I discovered in my university days in Belfast, and went forward in time from there, into the Romantics. It took emigration to Oz and a Bach-mad friend who sang in Melbourne's best choir, plus a few lucky choices, to send me back in time. So, my present listening is mainly baroque, but simultaneously I'm listening to, and learning the musical language of, Mahler and Shostakovitch, full sets of whose symphonies I now have.

The one place where I think I'll never go is modern music, where "modern" = something to terrify the neighbourhood cats. I've tried a number of different pieces, but have never "got" it and I suspect I never will. I suspect that "getting" such noise, er music requires a deep knowledge of music on a purely technical and intellectual level. I don't have that, only a superficial "I like that" appreciation, so I'm stuck with music with its heart on its sleeve. But that's fine - there is more than enough good stuff out there to last a lifetime.

 

Yes, when I look back through my collection, I can recognise several "periods"; There was the RVW time, collecting the choral works and the symphonies: I only listen rarely now, maybe because I've got most of what's out there, if only in one version.
Except for the big Bach works, I've never really been into multiple versions of the same work - too much else to do!
Then there were the McCreesh reconstructions, Hyperion's mediaeval music series and more recently Jordi Savall's discs on Alia Vox.
The one anchor in all this is the Cantatas - I still sit down for an hour or so every Sunday and listen to the Cantatas for the day, something I've been doing for 25 years, ever since Hessische Rundfunk started me off with their weekly Cantata. I've still lots of those on K7 somewhere, mostly Rilling (who was a Frankfurt professor at the time).