I've been listening to a lot of lieder recently, pretty much to the exclusion of everything else. In retrospect, it's not hard to see how I became afflicted with this disorder. I've always been a fan of Schubert's Winterreise , and of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder and Songs of a Wayfarer . These are works commonly regarded as peaks of lieder composition, so I guess I didn't feel the need to get deeper into the genre. A few years ago I started exploring the chamber music of Brahms (previously knowing only the symphonies and Requiem) and discovered many treasures. I started being intrigued by Brahms' musical progress through his life, and decided to try to assemble a "complete Brahms" (or more precisely, all the works he assigned opus numbers to). After purchasing a number of additional CDs and ripping at 256 kbps, I assembled nearly 5 gigabytes (44 hours) of MP3's, which I then burned onto 8 CDs in opus number order, and also carry around on my Toshiba Tablet. Here I am relaxing at DevConnections Read More...