After the big names so where next for newbies

First of all, don't be too daunted by the Naxos catalogue - Naxos have done such good service to neglected/forgotten composers that even those of us who have been listening for 40 years haven't heard of half of them!  For someone who has only been listening for a year, your list is already pretty impressive.

So to specific suggestions, with orchestral music in mind: if you struggle with Sibelius's Finnish gloom, how about his exact contemporary Nielsen's Danish optimism?  I would say start with the 4th or 5th symphonies before moving on, and if the bug bites you might then tackle such late rarified masterpieces as the 6th symphony, the flute and clarinet concertos.

20th-century late romantics who come to mind are Franz Schmidt (Naxos have just recorded all 4 symphonies - try no.4), Respighi - a master orchestrator (Pines of Rome, Fountains of Rome) - and Martinu, whose 4th symphony was my entry-point (what is it with 4th symphonies?).

As far as Rachmaninov goes, the symphonies, IMHO, generally show his inspiration at its weaker end - for a couple of orchestral crackers not involving the piano, you might like to try The Isle of the Dead and the Symphonic Dances.

And a final probably completely irrelvant suggestion - if you liked VW's Tallis Fantasia, you might enjoy... Tallis?

Happy listening,

DF

If you like early-to-mid twentieth-century orchestral music with a big brass and percussion sound, I can't recommend Janacek's Sinfonietta and Britten's Sinfonia da Requeim highly enough.  I was a percussionist for 12 years, and both works are among the handful of pieces I wish I had had the chance to perform.  I'd also second the above recommendation of Nielsen; his Fifth Symphony is extraordinary (and would also be among the handful of pieces I wish I had played -- killer snare drum part!).  I'd further check out Erich Wolfgang Korngold, specifically his Symphony from 1954, and Paul Hindemith's Symphonic Metamorphosis.

The American tradition from this period -- Ives, Barber, Copland, Bernstein, etc. -- is wonderful, very charismatic and a lot of fun.

For "Classical Music" I would suggest Max Reger (maybe the variations and fugues?) and Sergey Taneyev (probably the chamber music first such as the excellent Piano Quintet and Trio with Pletnev).  I would also keep trying with Mahler and perhaps dive straight into his 9th Symphony with Simon Rattle and BPO. 

You also don't mention opera and leider which are key components of CM!  I would recommend starting with Bizet's Carmen (C: Abbado) with its wonderful orchestration and then Verdi's Otello (C: Levine or Chung) or Falstaff (C: Bernstein) for an understanding of how music lifts these well known emotive stories to even greater levels.  Not forgetting Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte (C: Jacobs) - a true chamber opera and his best work in my opinion.

On leider I would go for Strauss Four Last Songs (C: J Norman or S Isokovski) and Shubert Winterreise (Lewis and Padmore is as good as any).

Finally if you haven't heard the Verdi Requiem (C: Gardiner or Pappano) or Faure Requiem (C: ?? Naxos Label) you are missing out.

Happy listening.

Barking_spiders, if you get the Danish Nielsen/Blomstedt cycle, do report back with your opinion.  I have Blomstedt's San Francisco Nielsen set, but £5.99 or whatever for the other one is unmissable if it's any good.  And you can't have too many Nielsen 5ths as they are literally all different, thanks to the 1st movement side-drum cadenza.

DF

Just to pick up on the Nielsen discussion - the Blomstedt Nielsen cycle is by my reckoning serviceable but not outstanding.

I'd recommend the Rozhdestvensky recordings with the Royal Stockholm Phil Orch on Chandos. The Third is particularly good.

Worth hearing is Osmo Vanska's just-boxed-up cycle on BIS with the BBC Scottish and Lahti Symph Orchs - as usual with Vanska, you might find you hear things in a way you didn't hear them before.

Not sure how interested you are barking_spider in historic recordings, but there's a performance of the Third taped in Sheffield (I think) from the old BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jascha Horenstein - it's on BBC Legends and is an absolute belter (as is its coupling, Sibelius 5). A real treasure.

Colin Davis is one disc into a cycle with LSO Live (currently 4 & 5), and it sounds like it will be very much worth having - full-boidied, battling, uncompromised in texture and sound.

Sorry to bang on about the Third but I think in many ways it's the symphony that most easily introduces the major/minor battle and other hallmarks of Nielsen's symphony writing.

Spiderjon: cultural characteristics most certainly can be and are strong and persistent, the desire to give voice to the culture which you inherited and were brought up in, the desire to fight against the repression of any such culture, or any forms of injustice in general, the will to accept and withstand the cruel vagaries of history, the wish to promote ideas of liberty and peace most certainly persist, but all these things are universal for me, and when people start calling them typically Irish or Russian, or Czech or Indian or French or whatever, this is what I think is a non starter. I said Dvorak and Smetana were Czech, better would have been Bohemian as Czechoslovakia didn´t exist then, nor does it today. Thirty years ago I´m sure some people were happy to talk about a Yugoslav national character, who would dare say such a thing today.

I´m completely with Stravinsky when he said that music expresses nothing. It´s a sequence of sounds no more nor less, whatever meaning a composer or a listener puts on a particular piece of music is ultimately subjective and completely arbitrary for me.