Taking them in reverse order: The Van Cliburn disc is one of the biggest-selling classical recordings ever. It was made just after Cliburn won the Tchaikovsky Competition, making him an instant celebrity.years.
I think it should be stated that he was a "great American pianist" at the height of the cold war. He was marketed and championed to some extent because of this. Though perhaps strange/dislikable/mentally ill, Bobby Fischer the chess champ was also some sort of American bragging rights during this time.
If you want to branch out there, you can try Hayden next or "Papa haydn" as he's somtimes called. He taught Beethoven. Beethoven is my far my most favourite composure. No one plays with the listener's emotions more or better than him IHO. If you were to go to Beethoven, I'd recommend his Symphony number 5 and 6 first followed by is piano concerto #5 or "emperor concerto" as its sometimes referred too. Those three compsures were the main ones in teh classical period. Before classical, there was barogue. Vivaldi, Bach, Handel are the compsures of that period in time. After classical period is the romantic period. Composers like Schubert, Wagner are there for sure. I don't know if Tchaikovsky fits in that genere.. not without looking it up on wikipedia anyway.
Like I said 20cents for vinyl is dirt cheap as long as its listenable. Enjoy
Haydn is one of the greatest, period. He was self taught, amazingly, and is given credit for inventing and/or taking the string quartet to great heights, and the format never looked back.
Mendelssohn's 200th b-day was just 8 days ago, and he is known as
the child prodigy. While Mozart is said to have written so much stuff as a kid (or maybe his dad did for him), he didn't write his first masterpiece until he was in his twenties. Felix did by age 16, the Octet for strings. He also both discovered and championed the works of the greatest of all time, Bach. (Back then, paper was very expensive, so they would take old scores to use as sandwich paper). He noticed immediately Bach's penmanship, stained with mustard, etc, on a kid's sandwich. He asked where they got the sandwich paper, bolted to the source, and found some great masterpieces! The St Matthews might've been one of them! Take with salt though, because there are some tall tales with great legends.
My favorite Beethoven piano concerto is the 4th, in G.
Brahms; Symphony #4.. The group Yes used the 2nd or 3rd movement... kinda cool
It's the last movement that is most famous, a passacaglia based on 8 bars. It's not ground bass throughout, so to speak, but the theme is always repeated somewhere throughout the entire mvmt, beginning to end.
If you put a gun to my head, and asked me Bach, or all of the other music ever created in the history of the world, I'm not sure what I would choose. Probably the former.
