I wouldn’t say Mahler is particularlyadvanced, per se, but if a Haydn symphony is a chicken and a Brahms symphony is a duck, a Mahler symphony is the whole damned turducken. You’d be forgiven for mistaking scale with sophistication – if Bruckner was an architect with access to an orchestra, Mahler was a conductor given access to music paper. Whatever there is good in Mahler, there’s just too much of it. Too Much. Like “Too Sexy” Brian Christopher and Scott “Too Hot” Taylor in 1998. Ironically for its status as the ultimate classical-snob-with-a-bitchin’-hi-fi music, there’s something awfully gauche and Trumpian about it all

I gave my evolution as a classical listener elsewhere, but here we are again, and how I’d suggest you go about it if you want to get deeper into classical music:

Spurred by prog I found a vinyl copy of Sviatoslav Richter’s renowned piano recording of Pictures at an Exhibition and a CD copy of Leif-Ove Andnes’s recording of Grieg’s piano concerto. These were my two early favorites.

When I was about 20 I pirated as many of the top 101 works out of a book as could be streamed free, and bought a further number of album-only-track albums to fill it out on a bad check, which my parents bailed me out for rather than be hampered by shit credit to start your life because of a dumb kid mistake – thanks for understanding, Mom and dad.

For a few years I ruminated on my little library of about 150 works plus modest vinyl library (I have five complete Beethoven symphony cycles – Toscanini, Solti, Szell, Karajan ’60s, Walter ’60s – and none are on CD), absorbing two books: Milton Cross’s two-volume 1950s Encyclopedia of the Great Composers and Their Works and the 1940s (pre-LP) Victor Book of the Symphony., both acquired via thrift stores. At this time in my life (21-26) I didn’t have Internet at home and had a flip phone so those books and CDs and records were basically all I had for five years. It’s highly unlikely a modern kid will follow in my footsteps.

For CD recommendations I stuck with going off Amazon for recommendations of a work from the Gramophone guide (mine was the 2006 guide) to classical recordings for modern and HIP performances or the 2004 Penguin guide for performances overall. At this point, from the foreword to the Gramophone guide I started collecting early music and early Baroque, but it took some time before those genres started paying dividends. In particular, one day the Naxos disc of Léonin and Pérotin just clicked, and I lay on the couch in ecstasy through the rest of the album, unlocking the door to a whole world of early music.

Nowadays I’m semi-retired as an active record collector. A few times a year I go to the local record store I’ve been patronizing since I was a preteen and raid the classical new-arrival boxes for $1.99 (or, in bulk, less – 30 discs for $30) each. It sets the agenda for much of my listening in a year.