Your one-stop-shop for classical music

Our mission is simple, to help make classical music cool again. Hundreds of years of fantastic, eloquent and passionate music is part of our heritage and history – and it needs to be rediscovered by new audiences. Today the fastest growing audiences for classical music are the young! By the way, we would love to see it as part of club mixes more frequently.

For far too long classical music has suffered from exclusivity when it can bring some much joy to anyone and everyone. You don’t need to be well read in opera or ballet to appreciate the melodies and skills of the musicians and artistry of the ballet dancers. Music is a tonic for all of us. In the early 1980’s Malcolm McLaren did much to awaken me to opera with his version of Madame Butterfly – still a stunning record and video today.

Whether we realise it or not, classical music is all around us, even if we think we don’t like it – when we do. It features heavily in film scores, theatre productions, computer games, TV adverts and even club music – Barber’s Adagio for Strings remains a constant of ambient mixes since the 1990’s. How many times do you see major artists beef up their gigs with strings – think of Metallica’s S&M using a full orchestra for example.

Back in the day, classical music had its own punk moments, able to cause riots by breaking musical conventions. We admire Nigel Kennedy for breaking the rules in the 80’s and 90’s in so many ways – we salute you Nigel, you are a hero.

Whilst some outlets today specialise in expensive record re-releases of classical music or centre around audiophiles seeking the very best recordings to show off their expensive equipment we don’t give a damn about that. We care about rediscovering and appreciating fantastic classical music on affordable pre-loved records, CDs and tapes.

Thanks to my dad I grew up hearing Italian opera on a Sunday afternoon on his home-made record player, which gave me a solid grounding in loving all kinds of music for life; even though I didn’t realise it back then. Classical music was cool then and so it is today. If only one new person get’s into classical music then it has been all worthwhile as far as we are concerned – and we think they will be very cool indeed!

Ian McNeice – founder of Classical Fantastical: The Classical Record Store UK

Note: We are currently adding full images of each record and CD to each listing. In the interim if you would like us to send you images of any product in stock you are interested in purchasing then drop us a line at info@theclassicalrecordstore.co.uk