Tuesday's List: My Favorite Classical Music Pieces

Although I thoroughly enjoy having classical music playing in the background wherever I am, and have at different times of my life identified certain pieces as personal favorites, I am usually somewhat lost when it comes to identifying what I'm hearing.  With the classical radio station I listen to the most...Gainesville's 102.7 WUFT/Classical...I'm usually driving and if I don't catch the title and composer of whatever is on before I reach my destination, then that piece remains unknown even if I like it a lot.  The following list of my personal favorite classical music pieces would assuredly be richer and longer if I knew the names of all the composers and works I've enjoyed over the years...maybe in the future I'll have such a revised list to present...

My parents...especially my mother...were big classical music fans and she loved to listen to Tchaikovsky.  So I got in early to listening to such works as the 1812 Overture and the ballets Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake.  As they added to their record collection I became acquainted with Schubert and his great "unfinished" Eighth Symphony, along with Beethoven's more renowned symphonies.  I took a music appreciation class at college in 1975 and learned about the prodigious works of Bach, among others.  During this period I began to enjoy listening to the music of several late nineteenth-to-early twentieth century French and Russian composers.  One of the French composers, Debussy, I discovered through a popular 1974 LP of electronic music that Isao Tomita made called Snowflakes are Dancing.  Over the ensuing decades, my list of classical favorites grew erratically, but I've still managed to compile a small one...what are your favorites?

And here is that list of my personal favorite classical music pieces:

1 PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION............Modest Mussorgsky/Maurice Ravel
2 POLOVTSIAN DANCES..........................Alexander Borodin
3 SYMPHONY no. 3 (OF SORROWFUL SONGS) ....Henryk Górecki
4 SYMPHONY no. 8 ("UNFINISHED") ......Franz Schubert
5 SWAN LAKE.............................................Peter Tchaikovsky
6 BOLERO....................................................Ravel
7 CANTATA no. 140 (WACHET AUF, RUFT UNS DIE STIMME) ......Johann Sebastian Bach
8 NOCTURNES............................................Claude Debussy
9 GRAND CANYON SUITE........................Ferde Grofé
10 REVERIE.................................................Debussy
11 PIANO CONCERTO no. 1......................Tchaikovsky
12 RHAPSODY IN BLUE...........................George Gershwin
13 MLADI (YOUTH)...................................Leoš Janáček
14 ARABESQUE no. 1.................................Debussy
15 THE ENGULFED CATHEDRAL...........Debussy
16 AN AMERICAN IN PARIS....................Gershwin
17 EINE KLEINE NACHTMUSIC..............Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
18 SLEEPING BEAUTY.............................Tchaikovsky
19 CLAIR DE LUNE....................................Debussy
20 SYMPHONY no. 9..................................Ludwig van Beethoven
21 CANTATA no. 147 (JESU, JOY OF MAN'S DESIRING) .......Bach
22 SYMPHONY no. 6 (PATHETIQUE) .....Tchaikovsky
23 THE PLANETS.......................................Gustav Holst
24 SYMPHONY no. 5..................................Beethoven
25 SYMPHONY no. 40................................Mozart
26 SYMPHONY no. 6 (PASTORAL) .........Beethoven
27 ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA........Richard Strauss
28 1812 OVERTURE...................................Tchaikovsky
29 THE NUTCRACKER.............................Tchaikovsky
30 SYMPHONY no. 3 (EROICA) ..............Beethoven