Explorations of the channels on my Comcast cable subscription led me to a big block of “music choice” channels in the very high numbers, where I (with my basic cable subscription) don’t normally venture. And there I found channel 942, “classical masterpieces”, offering what ordinary Americans think of as “classical music” (of the serious variety, not the soupy stuff intended for elevators or supermarkets).
Some experience with 942 suggests that it’s very heavily biased towards orchestral music (including orchestral transcriptions of vocal, solo-instrument, and chamber music), especially from the Romantic period. My personal tastes are centered on solo-instrument music (especially for my instrument, the piano), chamber music (which I think of as musical conversations), and opera and art song — especially from the Baroque and Classical periods — so 942’s programming is an imperfect fit for me.
On the other hand, the programming tends to favor obscure composers (a fair number are people I’ve never heard of, though you might take that just to mean that I’m a poorly educated philistine) and obscure compositions by more well-known composers (for instance, a work by Elgar I’d never heard of) — which brings me to what was playing when I first tuned in to 942: Joachim Raff’s (very long, and dramatic) Symphony No. 1, in a recording by the Bamberg Symphony under Hans Stadlmair.
