Here are the 27 composers (and their musical periods) I’ll be enjoying over the next few years:
Renaissance
Thomas Tallis (1505-1585) – 10 CDs
Baroque
Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713) – 10 CDs
Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) – 66 CDs
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) – 222 CDs
George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) – 65 CDs
Classical
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) – 150 CDs
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) – 200 CDs
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) – 90 CDs
Franz Schubert (1797-1828) – 40 CDs
Romantic
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) – 56 CDs
Frédéric Chopin (1810-1897) – 17 CDs
Franz Liszt (1811-1886) – 34 CDs
Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) – 71 CDs
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) – 50 CDs
Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881) – 14 CDs
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) – 60 CDs
Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) – 40 CDs
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1840-1908) – 25 CDs
Edward Elgar (1857-1934) – 30 CDs
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) – 16 CDs
Claude Debussy (1862-1918) – 33 CDs
20th Century
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) – 30 CDs
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) – 32 CDs
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) – 21 CDs
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) – 22 CDs
Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) – 36 CDs
Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) – 26 CDs
That’s 27 composers, covering some 500 years and four periods of Classical music.
At one CD per day, that’s 1466 days, or just a tad over four years. (Not counting the year I took off between Vivaldi 25 and Vivaldi 26.)
My criteria for selecting these composers was, first and foremost, that I had to be able to buy their complete works, or at least as close to their complete works as possible. In other words, there had to be CD box sets available to purchase, which I did – from all over the world.
Another criteria was that the composer’s music had to interest me. This wasn’t an exhaustive list of composers from the Renaissance period until now. This was a carefully culled list of composers who interested me and whose works were fairly readily available to purchase.