The Washington, D.C., area's classical music station is Classical WETA 90.9 FM. It is a wonderful radio station and is another good way to explore classical music. At www.weta.org, they publish the station's playlist every day so that you can plan ahead and also so that you have a record of what recordings were aired when. For example, today's playlist shows that the Philips 422.328 recording of Bach's Trio Sonata in D Minor (BWV 527) will air at 11:48pm. Both locals and non-locals alike should feel free to listen (if you're up that late), using the website's free Listen Live feature.
Every year, Classical WETA listeners vote for their 90 favorite pieces from the last 400 years or so in the Classical Countdown. It appears that operas are not counted, although some suites from operas (and ballets) are. The results are published at weta.org. You can view the most recent results here: http://www.weta.org/fm/features/classicalcountdown/vote
I was not content with this list, so I decided to go a step further and determine who are the Washington, D.C., area's favorite composers, roughly speaking. To do this, I used a simple approach. If a composer's work appeared at place n on the countdown, then that composer earned 91-n points. Thus, a composer would earn 91-1=90 points for the #1 ranked piece, and 91-90=1 point for the #90 ranked piece. A total of 19 composers ended up with point totals within one order of magnitude of Beethoven's point total (Beethoven won easily). Here is the resulting rankings list of composers (you can compare this list to the list from Composers, January 2009):
- Beethoven 732
- Bach 388
- Tchaikovsky 299
- Rachmaninov 298
- Mozart 211
- Dvorak 206
- Brahms 193
- Grieg 119
- Mendelssohn 119
- Handel 100
- Mahler 97
- Vaughan Williams 90
- Rimsky-Korsakov 86
- Saint-Saens 82
- Vivaldi 81
- Chopin 80
- Smetana 80
- Mussorgsky 74
- Gershwin 74
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