What I listened to most this year

2024 was a big year for Beethoven. As usual.

Dec 06, 2024

It’s December, it’s cold outside, and it’s finally here—it’s time to open the most exciting gift of the year. No, it’s not Christmas morning, we’re talking about Spotify Wrapped. The 2024 edition covers the music you listened to from the beginning of the year through sometime in November. As far as I know, your top artists are based on the number of times you streamed a track by that artist, not the actual amount of time you spent listening to this artist. (A song counts as being streamed if you listen to it for 30 seconds or more.) Your top tracks work the same way. This makes the metrics a little weird for classical music, since forty minutes’ listening could mean a single movement of Mahler or all 32 tracks of Gould’s 1955 Goldberg Variations.

Anyway, here’s what I was up to:

Beethoven, Brahms, and Mozart is exactly what I expected. I also saw Poulenc coming; I listened to so much of his music for my post earlier this year, I had a feeling he’d show up. I predicted Schoenberg would be on this list, however, mainly because I’ve listened to Gurre-lieder like a billion times in the past few months. So Bach’s appearance is a surprise—I don’t feel like I listen to that much Bach, all things considered.

Here are the top ten recordings I listened to most this past year (except pieces I’ve already written about on here, like Poulenc’s Stabat Mater and Brahms’s cello sonatas). I grouped them by instrumentation, going from opera to symphonies to concertos to chamber music to piano sonatas. I recommend all of these recordings, and I could easily be caught saying “that’s my favorite album of all time” about literally anything on this list. Spoiler: there’s a lot of George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra.

Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro, K. 492

Karl Böhm conducting the Orchester der Deutschen Oper Berlin, with Hermann Prey as Figaro, Edith Mathis as Susanna, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as the Count, Gundula Janowitz as the Countess, and Tatiana Troyanos as Cherubino

Produktfamilie | MOZART Nozze di Figaro Highlights Böhm

For the second year in a row, not only was this recording of The Marriage of Figaro my top album, it was all 5 of my top tracks. This is the highlights album, as the full-length performance got taken off Spotify (devastating). If you like this rendition, there’s a similar filmed version on Youtube, directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, but it lacks subtitles, unfortunately.