Obscure music
To celebrate getting my contact lens situation resolved (I'm back to 20/30 in either eye) I partook of what has become an occasional indulgence. The local HMV has a pretty much perpetual sale on the Naxos label of three CDs for $20. From time to time I use this to explore music I would otherwise be unlikely to hear. Right now I'm listening to a Shostakovich film score The Fall of Berlin from 1949. It's rather as one might expect a Shostakovich score for a Stalinist propaganda film to be and it certainly holds up to contemporaries like Coates or Walton and beats the heck out of anything being written for Hollywood at the time. Future listening includes guitar music by Hans Werner Henze and two orchestral suites by Geirr Tveitt.