I've never been much into symphony. Too boring.
Well, I'm going to listen to one symphony each week for the next year. The idea is to come to appreciate this genre more.
What I'd like to do is listen to each one all the way through, without distractions, as many times as it takes until I become addicted to it. If these works are as good as the classical music peeps believe them to be, well maybe there's something to it.
Here's the list of symphonies in listening order (not ranked), and also a spotify playlist (with the choicest recordings of each work). The order is kind of a countdown to the greatest symphonies, but it's also kind of interlaced for variety and to provide context for works that are later in the order. I put some thought into it I guess, trying to make the order the best way to wander down this path. These particular symphonies can be considered like this: "pretty close to a top 50, but some substitutions were made to maximize exploration and diversity of composers." For example, a lot of symphony aficionados might demand that all 9 Mahler and Beethoven symphonies are on any given top 50, but I only have 4 Mahler and 5 Beethoven. I wanted to explore some of the masterpieces by different composers.
Hey, maybe you wanna see what this is all about? If you are considering it, I'll say that the first two (I am unfamiliar with all of these, pretty much) aren't awful. If you ever wanted to dive in, I guess I've done some of the heavy lifting.
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1w...dcc4f7a5f347b4
Order:
Haydn #104
Beethoven #9
Suk Azrael
Brahms #1
Mozart #25
Mahler #2
Dvorak #7
Messaien Turanglila
Mozart #40
Sibelius #2
Gorecki #3
Dvorak #9
Schumann #3
Beethoven #5
Hindemith Mathis der Maler
Shostakovich #5
Nielsen #4 or #3*
Beethoven #7
Vaughan Williams #2*
Schubert #8
Rachmaninoff #2
Mahler #6
Walton #1*
Saint-Saen #3
Prokofiev #1
Mahler #3
Prokofiev #5
Bruckner #7
Gliere #3
Tchaikovsky #5
Janacek Sinfonietta
Shostakovich #10
Beethoven #6
Haydn #39
Borodin #2*
Chausson
Schubert #9
Sibelius #7
Brahms #3
Franck Symphony in Dm
Mendelssohn #4
Martinu #6
Mozart #41
Nielsen #5
Bruckner #8
Tchaikovsky #6
Brahms #4
Mahler #9
Berlioz SF
Beethoven #3
(*keeping this concrete wet for now)