Class... uh, Concert Music Collections

[TheVamp]

It's time to start listening to concert music again. Film music lately has become a formless pile of Media Venture poo so it's time to get back to the timeless pieces of orchestral greatness.
When I was but a small lad, my parents had several collections from TimeLife music that I loved. One of them in particular, "Festival of Light Classical Music" I played so much that, in the end, I couldn't hear the music over the sound of bacon frying.
I was wondering, anyone know of any collections today that I could purchase? I looked on the TimeLife site and they got nothing. I'm looking for collections that not only encompass the Classical and Romantic periods, but the Modern and Post Modern periods as well. Any suggestions? I'm looking at you, Shnurgus Maximus...

[shnurgle]

V-dash,
I'm not too hip on the compilation stuff, although I'm surprised that Time-Life doesn't at least have a collection of the American 20th Century cats (Copland, Ives, Roger Sessions, Elliot Carter, Walter Piston, Bernstein, Virgil Thomson et al) most of whom studied with Boulanger in Paris in the first half of the century. Nevertheless I think visitng any and all of these individually would be valuable in studying one of the "last great evolutions" of orchestral concert music. Outside the country, however, is where the most significant writing was done in the 1900's, including the works of Stravinsky, Bartok, Prokofiev, Debussy, Ravel, Messiaen, Boulez, Schonberg, Holst etc etc etc. Holst (like Barber, Britten, Shostakovich and many others) retained much Romanticism in his 20th century writing. His Planets suite, for example, is a perfect bridge between late 19th century symphonic writing and early 20th, in my opinion. In terms of of the strict Romantics, the list is equally long, but I wouldn't go too far without becoming aquainted with Dvorak, Berlioz, Wagner, Chopin, Weber, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Andrew Lloyd Webber, who's 1839 Concertoletto in C Double Flat, while possessing niether musical nor Romantic merit, remains, ironically, the "most downloaded song" on iTunes.

Anyway, enough name dropping, back to foosball.