From gentle awakening to explosive fanfare, duelling pianos to one chill lone voice, expand your horizons with a month’s worth of classical ear-openers
For Observer readers, January’s cultural diet is now a habit: first literature, in 2020, then last year’s sequel, short films. The best way to engage with those, surely, was sitting down with a box of chocolates and a hot-water bottle. Here’s a diet where you can listen and walk the dog, lift dumbbells, practise hula or, with care, reverse running. Whatever fitness trend you may have signed up to in a fit of optimism can also, in theory, be done with headphones on.
You can also do nothing but be an active listener: follow the rhythms, instruments, textures, melodies, patterns as they unfold or repeat or turn themselves upside down. Classical
music has a reputation for being dusty and difficult, something you have to know about to “get”. (Do you like it or not? Not such a hard question and the only one that matters.) These 31 pieces might lead you to aural pleasures as well as greater confidence in following your enthusiasms.