What are your listening plans for the next year?

[Florestan]

Do you have any gaps in your listening repertoire that you´d like to fill? Or any particular composer that you´d like to explore more?

For me there are several such instances.

Spanish Renaissance: Cristobal de Morales, Tomas Luis de Victoria, Antonio de Cabezon etc

English Renaissance: Tallis, Byrd etc

English Baroque: Purcell

French Baroque: Rameau, Lully etc

English Late Romanticism and Modernism: Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Bax, Holst etc

Russian Modernism: Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Miaskovsky etc

Haendel, Berlioz, Richard Strauss, Sibelius

Not that they are completely unkown territory to me but I feel I haven´t been giving them their due in my listening habits.

[king ubu]

One plan I had for this year but failed miserably: sort of try and listen chronologically to the early stuff I've amassed ... and read some while doing so, trying to get a deeper understanding. Not sure 2016 is the year to do so, as I've got so many things on the table (also music-wise ... break into string quartets in serious manner for instance, go on with my "listen to symphonies from Beethoven to ... (whom actually? Petterson?)" project, which will take more than just one year if I look at all the Mahler boxes around ... and of course this includes orchestral music by the likes of Debussy, Ravel, Roussel a.m.o., which again is mostly uncharted territory for me - at least uncharted as far as any kind of somewhat systematical listening goes).

So, that symphony project ... has started with Beethoven, then Mozart and - some - Haydn (still have to dig deeper into the Hogwood symphonies box, don't own any complete cycle but plan to live long enough to be around once the alpha cycle will come full circle, the first two discs are wonderful!), then went on with Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, and then got stuck halway into the romantics (thing is, I have 5-20 full cycles by each of them and lots of single recordings - blame box blather syndrome  - and I actually enjoy sticking to one symphony for an entire afternoon, listening to various versions, which eventually blur, making me wanna relisten before going on etc. - the very same thing happens with the Sibelius symphony listening I only just started this week ... no Tchaikowsky, Dvorák, Bruckner so far, but again, plenty of recordings waiting to be heard.)

One more feasible thing though, since it's going to be lotsa fun and I will also at least in part do it in a much more casual way: start exploring the naïve Vivaldi series! (does anyone actually have a full listing of all volumes?)

[Turner]

I have a Wan List, but it is now reduced to 15 items, and they are likely to be bought next year.

Immediately on the way is the box with the Sallinen symphonies & concertos (CPO) - almost none of those works are already in my collection.
Another one on the way is the EM Messiaen Edition box, just as only supplementary recordings to those I´ve got. So I´ll be digging a lot of Messiaen in January too, at least.

I have tons of unexplored music from all genres and periods (my collection is often that of a completist, and there are for instance 100s of symphonies I only have a vague or no impression of). I´ll be going in depth with some subjects. For example, get really acquainted with further Nørgård works.

But generally, I rarely do a lot of persistent listening according to a pre-meditated plan.

[Rinaldo]

I have a Wan List, but it is now reduced to 15 items, and they are likely to be bought next year.

I envy you. My wishlist stormed the 300 mark recently and given my current financial situation (left a well-paid job to pursue other, less profitable interests), there won't be any significant reduction coming next year.

That said, I will certainly acquire

[asin]B014G6AOAY[/asin]
to conclude my focused exploration of Ligeti and maybe dig into the Russian romantics a little bit more. Then there's Wagner operas beyond the Ring cycle.

English Renaissance: Tallis, Byrd etc

English Baroque: Purcell

*pounds the table with a teapot*

[Gurn Blanston]

Whoa! A plan? What a concept!      

I made a dent in Late Austrian Baroque this year, I would like to go further with that. There are some nice oratorios by Caldara and Fux available and I would like to move towards getting them and devoting some solid listening time. Also some organ works from Vienna and Salzburg. I have a great disk of Gottlieb Muffat, and I just ordered one from his father Georg. There is always Eberlin, but recordings (not played on gigantic German organs) are thin on the ground.

Otherwise I am going to go back in time, MY time, and relisten to a lot of my Mozart now that I have a grip on Haydn & Haydn, to see what adding some context to his works will do for them. I've been doing that a bit and finding it quite rewarding. I also would like to expand my collection of Classic Era contemporaries of Haydn and Mozart, not just symphonies.

[Sammy]

I don't even have a plan for the remainder of the year, but I'll go with my standard - dig deep into Stravinsky's music.  The problem is that I say this every year.

[Madiel]

Oh, I'm ALWAYS planning. I love grasping more context.

There's the Holmboe chronology to finish (I've got up to 1946 in a rush, but there's another 50 years worth of work to get through).

I'm also doing Dvorak chamber music chronologically, very nearly finished off the same with Brahms but a bit to go. I'm mid-Chopin chronology too. Bach cantatas are taking me years as recently mentioned on another thread.

Just started exploring Rachmaninov in an "era-by-era" kind of way, including listening online to works I don't have. I'm very keen to do the same thing with Beethoven, possibly sticking with works I own in that case, not sure yet.

I've just decided I need to listen to all 6 of the Stravinsky ballets I have, 3 of which I bought this year and haven't listened to yet. Stravinsky is a composer I might be interested in getting more of. And Prokofiev.

Firmer plans to buy more Haydn and a cycle of the Shostakovich symphonies. Mozart piano concertos are also high on the shopping list.

[The new erato]

Whoa! A plan? What a concept!      

I can relate to that. Whatsever on sale. 

I'll continue with my usual concept, digging into baroque opera and franco-flemish polyphony of which there are ever expanding new issus
es to explore, exploring the byways of early 20th century music from France and Italy, probably buy some Ginastera since there is an anniversary, contemplating a relisten to all of Stravinskys late music which I mostly love (perhaps even buying the DG box) - but to call this a plan is hilariously pretentious.

[Karl Henning]

I plan to listen.  Since I plan to write, too, a lot of my listening will be music that did not exist in 2015 

[Mirror Image]

My plan is to have no plan.

[ZauberdrachenNr.7]

I plan to listen.  Since I plan to write, too, a lot of my listening will be music that did not exist in 2015 

"Planning" suggests, however, that something of that music may exist already in gestation - whether a title, a concept, a succession of notes...if that is true your music owes something to good ol' 2015, however inchoate it may be!  [Sorry, just read a section of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations "Ist das Rechnen im Kopf unwirklicher, als das Rechnen auf dem Papier?", Untersuchungen I, 366]

[Karl Henning]

0:)   

[Jo498]

This is usually my clue for quoting J. J. Peachum's Song from Dreigroschenoper (Lied von der Unzulänglichkeit menschlichen Strebens Song about the insuffiency of human striving)

Ja mach nur einen Plan
und sei ein großes Licht
und mach dann noch nen zweiten Plan
gehn tun sie beide nicht!

Don't know whether this is also one of the songs that were strongly inspired by the original beggar's opera, or Villon but I do not think so.
I could try to find out or link to a youtube performance but I do feel insufficient (and I really do have a bad cold and maybe fever).

[ZauberdrachenNr.7]

I could try to find out or link to a youtube performance but I do feel insufficient (and I really do have a bad cold and maybe fever).

Gute Besserung, Jo498!

[Jo498]

Thank you! My sister or little nephew probably gave me the bug over Xmas...

To the point: I basically gave up listening plans several years ago after failing utterly for years in a row. So I completely agree with Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum here...

The only recent anniversary where I at least partly accomplished any listening plan inspired by such things was Haydn's 2009.
I totally failed Liszt and Wagner and for Verdi in 2013 I managed to see the Requiem live and listened to my three or so recordings and I came to appreciate the piece considerably more than I had before. But I did not even get started properly on the operas...

[Gurn Blanston]

I've been watching people make plans here for years. Not necessarily formal plans, but statements of intent, anyway. I think many of them fail because they try to encompass too much. Even long-range ones. I think it is best to focus on a small (relatively small, anyway) set of music than to go for something huge. I don't mind spending 5 years at a time on one composer. It isn't as though this is 100% of my listening, but it does take a lot of listening to really feel familiar with an entire oeuvre. How can anyone say "I'm going to learn everything about Bach this year"?   

I am still executing 'plans' I made 15 years ago, like the one of getting and listening to as many pre-Classic and Classic Era keyboard sonatas on period instruments as possible and getting a feeling for the development the form underwent between 1740 to 1810 or so. I may never have a recording of every work listed by Newman in his 'The Sonata in the Classic Period', but I have a lot of them and it is a very interesting project that will last for years longer.

That is the amount of time I am planning on for my Austrian Music from 1680 to 1750 project, too. I am in year 2 now, long way to go. The good thing is that the is a nice element of inter-relatedness so that what I learn from one I can apply to another. In the end, I may know nothing about a lot of stuff which seems obvious to most of you, but I hopefully will sure know a lot about my chosen subjects! 

[Madiel]

Reviewing 2015, I only managed to listen to 17 Bach cantatas, and 2 of those were on December 31. I'm a slower cantata listener than Bach was a cantata writer!

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

I plan to plunge myself into the unknown and see what I can find fishing around in classical music from across the globe.....

I also would like to spend 2016 coming to terms with Rachmaninov whose music is a taste I'm still acquiring

[Karl Henning]

Reviewing 2015, I only managed to listen to 17 Bach cantatas, and 2 of those were on December 31. I'm a slower cantata listener than Bach was a cantata writer!

A great many of us can say that.

[Karl Henning]

I plan to plunge myself into the unknown and see what I can find fishing around in classical music from across the globe.....

I also would like to spend 2016 coming to terms with Rachmaninov whose music is a taste I'm still acquiring

All to the good.