I'm generally not one for CD compilations and excerpts.

In fact, I usually despise them.

Just as I despise radio hosts who play excerpted movements or else put on a piece of classical music without telling you what you're hearing and who is playing it.

It may be where the market is these days, but I think such approaches just tease you. They deliberately whet your appetite with snippets and then kill it with frustration.

Listening interruptus.

I'm thinking particularly of releases like the new Sony 2-CD compilation "The Essential Leon Fleisher," a sampler designed to make money after the 80-year-old pianist Leon Fleisher, who after decades finally recovered use of his right hand, recently received the Kennedy Center honors.

(NEWS FLASH: Fleisher, by the way, will perform a recital next season at the Wisconsin Union Theater.)

The Sony package features a movement from several piano concertos, including Beethoven ("No. 5, "Emperor"), Mozart (No. 25, K. 503), Brahms (No. 1, Op. 15) and Grieg, plus a movement (the first movement) from Schubert's soul-searching last sonata (D. 960) and another movement (the third movement) from Brahms' wonderful Piano Quintet among other excerpts by Korngold and Brahms. Only Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand and "Alborada del Gracioso" stand fully intact and escape the editor's scalpel.

I supposed such a release may spark interest in Fleisher's other full-length, older recordings of the same works with Sony. (His more recent albums with Vanguard are "Two Hands" and "The Journey" and I highly recommend both.)

But what do I say about the Sony anthology?

Ugh.

Give me the complete works anytime, especially when they are great works performed greatly, as these are.

The pieces aren't all that long to take in. And such masterpieces are organic. You need to hear all of it to fully appreciate any of it.

That said, I recently did listen to a outstanding CD of edited excerpts.

It was the 81-minute, one-CD version of J.S. Bach's "St. Matthew Passion" with the Bach Collegium Japan under Masaaki Suzuki on the BIS label in a hybrid SACD format. (The same director, group and label are also recording all the J.S. Bach cantatas, and I highly recommend them right up through Vol. 37.)

The singing and playing are quite beautiful, even if some articulation is a little muddy in the choruses.

Most of all, I know it will be a long time before I will sit down and listen to the complete 2-CD set, which I have by several different groups. If it were a live concert experience, I would gladly go hear the complete "St. Matthew Passion." But sitting at home to a recorded performance of that is a different story, at least for me.

And for me the same thing holds true for multi-hour operas, at least on CD if not DVD.

I really don't mind hearing the "best of" type CDs where a two- or three-CD opera is edited down to one CD with the best music.

Is this hypocritical of me? It certainly is practical.

Do any others share my guilty pleasures?

What do you think in general about excerpt albums?

Are there some excerpt albums and samplers you like and recommend?

Are there others that just irritate and annoy you and make you wonder how they can do such a travesty to art?

Let me and other Art Talk readers know.