DJLegba, you were right on in your assessment of my sorting problem above, thanks again!
Lawrence, that's a good example of a tricky tag senario for classical music. As djl says it all depends on how you listen to classical albums. JRiver is a huge sandbox for setting up your own personal system, over time I have evolved three main ways of listening to classical works:
I want to hear a specific piece: Search, find and play. As long as tags for Tittle, Album Artist, and Composer are correct this is easy. Usually the suggested tags from a rip are wrong (Beethoven=Album Artist, etc.), so it pays to get this right on rip or import.
Browsing: Flip through album covers, pick one and play. I have a lot of different views set up, and the original reason I started consolidating albums is to avoid seeing tons of duplicate covers. For me looking at one cover is much better, it better approximates what I used to do shuffling and rearranging all my CDs back in the 90s, all multi disc sets would be in a box together.
I think I tried having an additional [Disk] view category a few years back, but I liked having fewer clicks to get to music and couldn't get the single disk albums to not have an extra category that just said (none) or (disk 1). I'm sure there is a decent work around here, but the single super album works for me.
Classical Concert Radio: I want to listen to a shuffled limited set of works, but not completely shuffled track by track and instead grouping by works. Basically WQXR from my CD collection.
I hacked a complicated system for this based on track links and tags. Track links aren't enough, because it seems the track links function as a numerical sequence going up until there is a break in continuity. So in a shuffle I would get a lot of second and third movement starts, missing the earlier movements. But I noticed that every time a first movement appeared I would get the full work without fail.
So I started tagging first movements with "First Movement" in the Comment tag. Then a smartlist can look for all Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart Quartet files with this tag, and I get a nice mix with complete works. The smartlist can be pinned to Car Radio buttons for easy access. I can also hit "Play Shuffled" on a multi disk collection/superalbum and get a different order every time that makes musical sense.
I'm sure there is a more elegant way to do this, but this tagging hack works consistently for me so I'm happy.
So that's what I would do with the Garrick Ohlsen collection, make a huge album and link all multi work concertos and sonatas and tag single movement works and first movements with a "First Movement" tag. This would play nicely with my smartlists and views.
DJL, I think your tagging system could work for this as well. If you have unique album names for individual works you can hit [Expand to Full Album] in a smartlist and you would have full works, its a simpler solution as well. I think you are right on with the idea that it should approximate how you like to listen to other media, LPs Cds Radio etc.
Hope this helps! There are other tagging solutions posted in the forum, a couple long threads on classical tags in the last year alone. Also, check out the website
http://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/TG/2_Classical.html for some interesting ideas for classical tags.