For me it was Moonlight Sonata finale. Then Chopin Revolutionary and Liszt’s La Campanella.
What about you?
lyk da mini 
da ZERB 4th imp
For me it was Chopin op.53. It really was like a lightbulb moment. I had no idea that this was classical music. I never been exposed to the good stuff before that.
Any particular performance? For me it was funnily enough a random midi 
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Within the first two pages. I couldn’t believe people could play scales that fast.
True. As a seasoned Metal fan I responded to the virtuosity and fury of the Moonlight 3rd mvt.
I realized there was difference between the fury in Metal and Classical.
Metal didn’t build fury, and didn’t rely on relativity and contrast as much. Therefore the emotive ceiling of expression was limited to a 8/10 ish range. But this is sustained.
Contrast this to the fury I experienced in classical - it relied upon a keener more focused ear to be sensitive to the relativity - but the relativity yielded rewards in the discovery that while the music doesn’t maintain the ferocity of metal…it achieves higher peaks of fury and intensity.
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Fantaisie-Impromptu
Funnily enough I also come from metal (sort of), and was also more in to virtuosity than Brendel in my teens (though which kid isn’t). I still maintain that rock is the closest equivalence to art music among popular stuff.
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I still like metal, although I don’t explore new stuff. Nighwish are coming in November, I should probably go see them even though I haven’t listened to them since Dark Passion Play.
Which metal bands are your favourites?
The same as 14 years ago, mostly Metallica and Nightwish. I like an album here and there from bands like Megadeth, Slayer, Blind Guardian, In Flames, Dimmu borgir etc.
Good picks! A lot of the problem with metal is the same with all music.
We are very fortunate in the ‘classical’ world to have had the benefit of posterity separating the wheat from the chaff and the quality sticks around.
I don’t listen to a lot of metal but a few bands really stand out head and shoulders. I personally think Wintersun are the best modern metal band.
Watch that bit from 4:40 , that riff is gold.
Da rock c sharp minah 
I think it was actually played by da man himself, a roll or sumtn.
I was stoned and amazed, had it on a loop for like 1 hour.
Definitely sum brotha. I wuz quite obzezzed with his zonz from about 7 to 13.
That’s rezpek actually. I liked Moonlight, Pathetique and Waldstein very early on, but it wasn’t until I was approaching 20 that I began to appreciate the unnamed ones. At 13 I didn’t understand them at all.
I’m still unsure if I “get” op 78 tbh 
And I just don’t like op 22 and find op 2/2 perfunctory.
I played op 2/3 at 13. Still very fond of it.
Same. 
Of all people, it was Pollini who got me in to Op.78. 
Perhaps this:
will help you towards a new appreciation of op.22. I know it caused me to view it in a new light 
I’m suspicious by those smilies at the end, but I’ll give it a try tonight.
What really is amazing actually is how I still keep discovering what’s in these sonatas, even now 20 years after I first sat down with them. My latest are the little Op.49 Sonatinas, which I knew well but thought I didn’t like. But then, enter Igor Levit - and this was only this past January. Now I love at least the first of them as much as any of the rest.
With some justification. 
Revelatory, though, lol. 
Damn, op 22 was the first one I did, and I think the first one I’d ever heard (in Barenboim’s recording, no less).