THANK YOU SO MUCH! I'm a little anal and this has been bugging the heck out of me for the last year! When I load a Beethoven album onto my computer I want it sorted under Beethoven not the recording orchestra. I've also been able to create a special multiple artist field for jazz master's collaborations.
Sure, glad it helped. I'm really OCD, about my collection too. For Jazz and classical I use Soloists extensively ... I have a custom field for "Work" for classical, and I'm thinking of adding an "Opus" field now - not to mention multiple sub-genres, styles and period fields I use
Just a tip if I may, you will probably change your mind on how your views work and what information you want to access as you get to know JRiver more. So, I would recommend keeping fields like Artist, Composer, Orchestra fields intact. Even if they are redundant sometimes. 'eg. currently for classical I use the orchestra/ensemble for the Artist, Composer as Album Artist, and add the last name of the conductor as the Album Name to separate different versions. The orchestra field and composer field still remain populated. If there are primary players, singers - they will be under soloists ... if I change my mind again, I can simply transfer one of these elements to another field.
As you can have multiple artists per record (track), is usually better to use Various Artists (or Various Composers - for classical if you use the composer for the Album Artist field, I find this handy) for compilations. I Have changed my classical views three times already and having the data in other fields, you can always change your mind relatively effortlessly.
You probably want to create a specific view(s) just for classical music though. As the sorting orders probably won't be the same, nor what you want to filter by.