Coming to like Rachmaninov (slowly) ?

Last year's winner of the Stanford Concerto Competition had their concert during Spring quarter this most recent academic, as always. When I went to the concert last year, the pianist (Jack Yang, then a Junior, if you know him) played Beethoven's fifth piano concerto, a really pretty, monstrously large piece. 'in my favourite key, too: Eb major. Anyway, the soloist for this most recent concert, whose name I can't remember, played Rachmaninov's third piano concerto. Before this I'd never listened to any Rachmaninov before, but the first movement, at least, stuck in my mind.

I started listening to music when I was about seventeen. For three or so months, I listened to what my dad listened to -- R&B and rock from when he grew up. Co-incidentally, at this time, I became more serious about playing piano. My previous teacher, from when we were in Russian, had never taught me anything about technique or interpretation. Or sight-reading, for that matter: I sight-read really terribly. After my first five years of playing, I was under the impression that to play a piece well was to play it as ostentatiously as possible, at the greatest speed possible while paying no attention to dynamics.

When we arrived in South Africa, my new teacher worked hard to undo everything my previous teacher had taught me. Eventually, she gave me had some impact. At this point, my dad started to like classical music, given that I was playing better. I then followed him. We started out listening to Alicia de Laroccha's really pretty recordings of the Mozart piano sonatas and then branched out slowly. When I got to college, I thought Beethoven was way too late a composer for me to like, 'cause I only liked Mozart (who still remains my favourite composer) and Bach (second-favourite) and Haydn. Slowly, through influence from friends, I came to like later and later composers. I would have said I've reached my limit with Chopin. Until, that is, I heard Rach 3. It seems, now, quite conceivable that I could eventually come to like some of Rachmaninov's music, even though I'd always dismissed him as "hotel music" or "elevator music." Part of it may be that he reminds me of Russia; I'm finding myself occasionally listening to some Tchaikovsky, too.

Perhaps I can no longer divide my music tastes purely chronologically: Liszt , for example, lived almost completely before Rachmaninov, yet I'm about as convinced as I can be that I'll never come to love his music. I can't group it as dissonant vs. non-dissonant, either, though that was once the case. Mozart, even, uses dissonance in wonderfully interesting ways -- just look at the C major string quartet or his absolutely gorgeous c minor fantasia.

What is it that makes composers like Liszt, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Britten, Adams and others so different, then? They're different from each other, too. As much as I'd like to say that their music, collectively, just sounds random, it clearly isn't.

If I had to guess, I'd say that by far the majority of my musical friends are Romantic-era - oriented, with just a few Modern-oriented (modern classical) and even fewer preferring Baroque- and Classical-era music.