October 24, 2026 12:14 pm
There is a kind of game going around on FaceBook. It is utterly meaningless, but lots of fun — at least for a certain nerdy type of classical music lover. Each poster is offering a selection of nine recordings formatted three-up and three-down, and titled “My9Albums” and subtitled “The sound that made me.”
I like that last bit. The music we heard certainly helped shape who we have become. For many, it was the pop tunes playing on the radio as they grew up. For those of us who veered off into classical music, it was much the same, although with a different program.
I’ve come across more than a score of these posted on FaceBook. There is a website that helps you make one of your own (https://my9albums.org). Making one of these helps you figure out who you are, musically speaking. You have to choose only nine from the dozens, hundreds or thousands of CDs you have in your collection. Which of all of them mean the most to you.
I took it a slightly different way, as if it were a “desert island” collection. What would I take with me to fill the rest of my years, and the thought of only nine CDs is, of course, impossible. So, I cheated.
My list is nine boxes of recordings. Still only making nine purchases in all, but giving me enough variety and quality to last out the time on this planet. These are not all my favorite performances, but they are all very good. And in really full boxes.
First, the Glenn Gould Box. If I had only one CD, it would be the 1955 Goldberg Variations, but that lasts only a scant three-quarters of an hour (why did you take no repeats, Glenn?) But there is so much more Bach keyboard music that he recorded. Thirty CDs worth.
He is not for all tastes. His particular touch on the keyboard makes a sound world no one else can match (or perhaps want to match). There is a clarity to his counterpoint that is almost magical. On the other hand, there is the matter of his humming along.
Then, there are the many large choral works that Bach wrote. I almost chose the St. Matthew Passion by itself. It is monumental as little else has managed in music history. But why pass up all the other big works, and with John Eliot Gardiner, you get a decent helping of cantatas, too.
Gardiner is not my ideal interpreter of Bach. He is one of those historical performance practice people, and can feel a little thin on the ear compared with someone like Otto Klemperer, whose St. Matthew Passion is overwhelming, but many of my choices here are not the “best” available, yet, they are all good solid performances and will give you the charge you seek.
I could never live without a set of Haydn symphonies. There is no perfect set of them. Antal Dorati does decent work in all of them, but sometimes seems a bit pedestrian. Thomas Fey died before finishing and his box was topped off by a substitute conductor. The most consistent and lively set is by Adam Fischer with the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra. He is a bit weaker in the final London symphonies, perhaps, but he really gets the prime middle-period works that are charged with wit and humor.
You got to have Beethoven, and while I hate not including his string quartets or piano sonatas, the box by Nikolaus Harnoncourt contains essentially all of Beethoven’s orchestral music. Harnoncourt is an idiosyncratic conductor and can sometime get a touch loony, but he’s on fairly good behavior in this repertoire, and you get all the symphonies and concertos and the overtures and ballet.
Ah, Brahms. Deutsche Grammophon put all of his music into a single box, with 46 CDs. Lots of Karajan, but that’s the price you have to pay. Actually, he’s pretty good in this music. But there are plenty of other orchestras and baton wavers here, too. But the bulk of the music is the chamber music and the choral songs, of which Johannes wrote a cartload. As with the other selections, I have my favorite performances elsewhere, but with this box, you have all of them together and all in very good, if not always the best, performances.
Daniel Barenboim is an excellent Wagner conductor, and a surprisingly inexpensive box from Warner has all of the main music dramas of the monomaniacal composer. Opera mavens may complain that he never had access to the golden age of Wagner voices, but his casts do very well, even if they aren’t Birgit Nilsson or Wolfgang Windgassen. The box is worth it for the Ring Cycle alone.
Gustave Mahler didn’t write a lot, numerically speaking, but the size of what he did was prodigious, and no conductor matches his prodigiosity like Lenny. Bernstein recorded two complete sets of symphonies, one for Sony (actually, back then, it was Columbia), and a second set for Deutsche Grammophon. Anyone who cares has both sets. But this box adds Das Lied von der Erde and the orchestral songs, and thus fills out the repertoire. Maybe a few of the Sony versions are marginally better, but then, some of the DG versions improve on the first set. Pays your money and takes your choice. For the desert island, I’m going with this set.
Debussy is more than just the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and Claire de Lune. In fact, he fills up 33 discs in this set. And it’s not all hazy Impressionist fog, either. He could be edgy and avant. Take Jeux, for instance. Please. How many have heard that. And the final three sonatas. Goodness, I love them. Then, there’s all that piano music. It’s endless pleasure.
This DG box leans heavily on Pierre Boulez, who is good in this repertoire, but perhaps a bit cool. Stravinsky liked cool. But other conductors find more heat in the scores, and those recordings can be more exciting. Yet, one shouldn’t complain; Boulez has everyone on their toes, playing the best they can. And it’s not all ice. They even include Bernstein leading Les Noces and the two wartime symphonies. There is just so much music. Who would have thought the old man to have had so much music in him?
I am sorely conscious of how much music is left out of my nine boxes. Where’s Mozart? Surely the piano concertos were worthy. Where’s Schubert, or Bartok, or Rachmaninoff? Vivaldi wrote nearly 500 concertos; surely that would have given me boatloads of music to last a long time.
But this list comes with 258 CDs of music that I love, music that I have internalized as part of who I am. That will have to do for now.
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Posted by Richard Nilsen
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Beethoven, classical music, music, orchestra, piano
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