Steve,

I bought a $10 set of 4 CD's of Handel's works. I often play some of it while I am painting my pictures. It's very good for focusing the brain and for losing my conscious self in the artistic process. Time just flies by and it can be some of the best times of my life - listening to beautiful music while creating something visual.

I'll go through the Handel CD's and list the works I especially like.

I'm listening now to Concerto Grosso in B flat maj.

Xerxes: Largo is very slow and stately.

Organ Concerto in D Minor, Op. 7/4 is beautiful. The Adagio movement almost makes me want to cry and then near the end of that movement it transforms into a such a powerful statement before the happy, bright Allegro movement starts.

The $10 sets may not be the world's best performances - although I think they sound ok - but it is a cheap way to investigate different composers to find the ones I like.

I suppose that early in this thread I would have mentioned J.S. Bach's St Matthew's Passion - the version by Thijs Van Leer with the female singer. Whenever I hear that piece I am transported back in time to when I was a poor, starving student with only a tiny transistor radio to listen to, hearing that beautiful piece for the first time. I was transfixed, like a fly in amber. I could not have moved even if I had wanted to, not until that music had finished. And then, although I went out and bought the vinyl record as soon as I could afford it, I had no record player so I didn't hear it again until many years later, so I had to carry it in my mind until I could hear it again, and when I did hear it I was just as transfixed as the first time.