Classical Music for Aficionados

Jim, please, please try listening to V-W's Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus.  If that doesn't win you over, nothing will.

The problem with The Lark is that it's pretty instantly appealing, and so it gets trotted out overly frequently and hence becomes a chestnut.  A moratorium of a few years would help a lot.

Bruckner; I'm a Mahler fanatic and also a sucker for slow movements.  Hence 7, 8, and 9 rank high in my personal pantheon.

So I listened to Mariam Batsashvili's CD of transcriptions.

Music: I'm no expert, but the pianism seemed really excellent.

Sound: the timbre of the piano was very natural and entirely credible.

But... the audiophile in me had a problem with the soundstage.  There was no sense of the room, the space, the acoustic, in which the piano was being played.  If I had to guess, I'd say it was miked very close up.  I tried to get a sense of the perspective from which we were supposed to be listening to the recital.  For some of the time, it seemed as if the perspective was more or less looking at the piano/pianist head-on, so that the lower register tended to the right speaker and the upper to the left.  But then this would collapse or even flip in another passage.  Hmmm.