Five Favorite Composers You Hadn't Heard About In the Beggining

[Florestan]

I mean, five composers which are now firm favorites but about whom you hadn't heard when you started listening to classical music.

My list in no particular order

Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari
Reynaldo Hahn
Nikolai Medtner
Hugo Wolf
Sergei Bortkiewicz

Honorable mention: Sigismond Thalberg, Henri Herz, Granados, Albeniz, Mompou

[springrite]

Havergal Brian
Rued Langgaard
Charles-Valentin Alkan
Edmund Rubbra
George Perle

[Mirror Image]

Interesting thread idea, Andrei. This could be a bit tricky as I think many of us haven't heard a lot of the names we're familiar with now outside of the more well-known names.

Let's see...(in no particular order):

Martinů
Falla
Enescu
Roussel
Villa-Lobos

Honorable mentions: Zemlinsky, Koechlin, Ginastera, Revueltas, Chávez, Britten, K. A. Hartmann

[Brian]

Oh, I LOVE this question!!

Far and away #1 is Janacek. I remember enrolling in university in Houston the year after the Houston Grand Opera finished a complete cycle of every Janacek opera, and I thought, "wonder who that weirdo is and why they would do that when I've never heard of him." Imagine if I was 5 years older and could have seen them all live!!!! Truly it is amazing that they did that project!

Close behind him are Martinu and Roussel, whom I found out about after age 20. (I guess some people would still call it early but I was on GMG at age 16!  )
So many more options after that: Mompou, Nielsen, Biber, Kalliwoda, Weinberg, Britten (I never heard the Young Person's Guide), Smetana, Scarlatti, Zelenka, and literally anyone from post WWII (Salonen, Auerbach, Brouwer, Matthews, Lutoslawski, etc). We didn't have any Shostakovich in the house but I must have heard about him somewhere.

And then there are others who were barely there, like my parents only had two CDs of Haydn (92/94/96 on CBS and a trumpet concertos collection) and the only Vaughan Williams that I knew about until college was "Fantasia on Greensleeves" because they played it at Christmas. (Certainly did not know about "Hodie"!) Fazil Say we had because he's Turkish and so's mom, but we only had him as a pianist (Tchaikovsky concerto 1), not a composer.

I'll go with Scarlatti and Nielsen to complete the top 5. If thinking RVW is just the guy who wrote Greensleeves counts as not knowing who he is, he can take Nielsen's place. What a great question.

[springrite]

Havergal Brian
Rued Langgaard
Charles-Valentin Alkan
Edmund Rubbra
George Perle

Instead of "Five composers which are now firm favorites but about whom you hadn't heard when you started listening to classical music", I decided to name five that I did not know during my first few years of listening to classical music. I think this is more relevant since, as pointed out, most of know no more than the few usual suspects when we "started listening to classical music."

[Symphonic Addict]

Respighi
Langgaard
Tubin
Martinu
Schnittke

[Maestro267]

Technically I hadn't heard of any of them at the beginning of my listening. Tchaikovsky was the first.

[springrite]

Technically I hadn't heard of any of them at the beginning of my listening. Tchaikovsky was the first.

My point exactly!

[Rinaldo]

Respighi
Langgaard
Tubin
Martinu
Schnittke

Very close to what my list could look like. Respighi, Schnittke and especially Langgaard are names I haven't encountered when the classical world started to interest me - and all three are now among my favourite composers. Others that immediately spring to mind are Elizabeth Maconchy and William Lawes, both tremendous discoveries for me.

[Florestan]

Technically I hadn't heard of any of them at the beginning of my listening. Tchaikovsky was the first.

My point exactly!

When I started listening to classical music, I already knew some Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Vivaldi, Grieg, Chopin, Ravel and Bizet.

[Rinaldo]

When I started listening to classical music, I already knew some Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Vivaldi, Grieg, Chopin, Ravel and Bizet.

Same here. I could hum some Mozart, Vivaldi, Bizet or Grieg (and know it's tunes by those guys) a decade before diving into it all.

[71 dB]

Nice idea for a thread. 

Sergei Taneyev
Mieczyslaw Weinberg
Jean-Philippe Rameau
Alessandro Scarlatti
Enrique Granados

[Symphonic Addict]

My point exactly!

Was Tchaikovsky your first encounter also with classical music?

[Symphonic Addict]

Very close to what my list could look like. Respighi, Schnittke and especially Langgaard are names I haven't encountered when the classical world started to interest me - and all three are now among my favourite composers. Others that immediately spring to mind are Elizabeth Maconchy and William Lawes, both tremendous discoveries for me.

My first encounter with Langgaard was in 2008. For some reason I don't remember right now, the webpage dedicated to him popped up in my internet explorer and I checked it out. The content there was enough to keeping me astounded till now (and on) and with the subsequent recordings of his works.

I know nothing about Lawes. In what spectre of styles you put him?

[springrite]

Was Tchaikovsky your first encounter also with classical music?

Johann Strauss Jr., Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Dvorak, Gershwin, Mozart

[Symphonic Addict]

Johann Strauss Jr., Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Dvorak, Gershwin, Mozart

Except for Gershwin, those all were first introductions for me as well, and I also forget it, Vivaldi too.

[Symphonic Addict]

Other quite interesting composers whom I came to know a while after are Paul Hindemith, Francis Poulenc and Erich W. Korngold, all from 1890's.

[vandermolen]

Braga-Santos
Staney Bate
Richard Arnell
David Diamond
Yoshimatsu

[Rinaldo]

I know nothing about Lawes. In what spectre of styles you put him?

English baroque with a twist. He's kind of like Jan Dismas Zelenka to me: they both make complex stuff sound effortless and keep throwing amazing curveballs.

[Jo498]

Bruckner and Mahler would probably be the most prominent.
Admittedly, I cannot reconstruct this clearly but I certainly had never heard of them before and probably at most their names even for a year or two already listening to Dvorak, Haydn, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Schubert etc. I remember that I found it preposterous to have symphonies longer than Beethoven's 9th that frequently needed two LPs... (although the first Bruckner and Mahler I got was already on CD, it was in the intermediate time in the late 1980s when stores still had LPs as well).

Next would probably be Janacek and Shostakovich. Another one is Fauré I encountered much later. There are quite a few moderately famous/important composers that were at best names to me for many years. My first encounters were typical "warhorses" and for several years I was rather strongly focussed on favorites like Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart. However, I usually got to know at least the names within the first ca. two years of classical listening because I read all the popular guides on music etc. I got my hands on.