Cool @Marq, feel free to dive in. I hope you get some value from it.
Just to be clear I don’t claim these recommendations to be in any way “definitive”. “People’s tastes, like their bottoms, are split down the middle” (as they say here in Sweden) so if you ask 5 people which is their favourite performance/recording of a certain work you’ll get at least 6 answers.
This is just my way of paying forward the appreciation and love of classical music that I inherited from my parents over the first half of my life. I was literally in my 30s before I started playing classical myself for my own enjoyment, and suddenly discovered that I had, by some sort of osmosis and completely subconsciously, acquired a mass of experience. I never had to take myself through the discovery phase with classical from a clean sheet because I was being spoon-fed a diet of it literally every day from birth. I hated it at the time, but slowly it grew on me.
Now one of the most common things I hear among non-classical listeners wanting to dip into classical is that it is overwhelming, “there’s just too much”, “where do I start?”. So it occurred to me that one approach would be to be very prescriptive, provide “swim lanes” to make the “pool” less intimidating. So I decided to pick an arbitrary list of representative works and then present my (in many cases my parents’) favourite recordings, many of which are in turn based on recommendations harvested from decades of reading the Penguin Guide to Records (latterly CDs) and Gramophone magazine. Thanks to the advent of streaming sites like Qobuz this becomes an almost trivially easy undertaking.
So there it is. I am still hoping some of our real classical buffs will chime in with their own favourites, but even if not I intend to see this through so it can serve as a resource for anyone that might find it helpful as long as the forum remains active. Happy listening!