My Zune 80GB has helped me reconnect with Classical music. Before, I only had a 2 GB flash player, which got so filled up with exercise music I had little room for classical, which I hate to compress down to tiny 64 kbps WMAs. Now, I'm loaded!
Digital format classical is not too hard to find. There's some in the Zune Marketplace, and plenty available in DRM-free MP3 on places like Amazon. The nice thing about classical is that you can find quite a bit on CD the local library (that means free!). Also, an advantage to something like the Zune Marketplace with subscription option is you can listen to the same piece by different ensembles/conductors without having to buy the "same" CD 10 times; you will definitely notice a difference between the same piece as conducted by Karajan and Bernstein, for example. As to whether you rip CDs from the library, that's up to you. :-)
Just a few of the classical staples I have on my Zune are:
- Beethoven's Symphony 7 - the allegretto will make you cry. If you like it, I recommend the Jacque Loussier Trio's variations on the allegretto, where the entire CD is jazz trio variations on that 1 movement. The idea might seem weird and repetitive, but it's very listenable. Anything by Loussier is good, by the way.
- Dvorak's New World Symphony - one of my all-time favorites
- Leonard Bernstein's Candide - actually opera, but who's nitpicking?
- The Planets by Holst - you will recognize a lot of the movements in this one. My favorite recording is from Charles Dutoit and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, but I lost the damn CD so now I'm listening to James Levine and the Chicago Symphony. Lots of variety in this piece, from peaceful to bombastic
- Vivaldi's Four Seasons - very good and famous composition. I highly recommend the great interpretation on period instruments by Il Giardino Armonico
- Smetana's The Moldau - also very recognizable, and very relaxing
- Dvorak's Serenade for Strings - I have this by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, really good stuff and another of my longtime favorites. Notice that Dvorak makes my list twice!
- Anything on piano by Vladimir Horowitz or Glenn Gould - seriously, anything by these guys will make your brain bigger, and maybe your heart, too.
My recommendation if you are new to classical is to get a compilation album like Top 100 classical songs or something like that, you can pick these CDs up at a truck stop for 2 bucks. Classical snobs will look down their noses at you, but screw them. You will get the more well-known movements from great works, and then you can pick what you like to follow up and get the whole composition.
And by the way, to your comment about people who might say you suck... people who describe classical music as "easy listening" have no soul. Zamfir and Kenny G are easy listening, Mozart is far from easy.
Go classical!
