If you like that

A recurring theme: I like X, what else might I like? Some thoughts from me.

20th Century meets early music
The late 19th and early 20th Century saw composers turning to folk music, either to preserve folk songs or to bring music back to its roots. Britten, Vaughan Williams, Respighi, Dvořák and others, all writing music based on the strong simple melodies of their youth, and hindsight adding the touch of tristesse, knowing that not only the songs but also the life they accompanied, were dying.


 * Ottorino_Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances takes early lute songs and embellishes them with a definitively 20th Century twist, and if you like that then do try his Concerto in modo misolidio, a superb take on modal music, a theme in the mixolidian mode. I can't recommend it highly enough.  And of course there's his trilogy of tone poems the pines, fountains and festival of Rome, with the pini di roma being especially evocative - close your eyes and see if you can picture the ghostly Roman legion marching down the via appia, it sends shivers down my spine.
 * Janáček Sinfonietta, a tour de force for brass and winds originally written in homage to the Czech armed forces and titled the military sinfonietta, expanded for the Sokol Festival and the word military dropped from the title. One of a small number of works by Leoš Janáček that are widely known, along with the opera The Cunning Little Vixen and his Glagolitic Mass.  The sinfonietta is in five movements, and the style is very much of the early 20th Century, taking its cues from folk music but adding bold dissonant chords and demanding inner parts, without losing its essential simplicity, perhaps even austerity.
 * Aram Khatchaturian made his name by writing the theme for The Onedin Line (not as a commission obviously, but it's not that unlikely as he did write a number of film scores, he only died in 1978), his adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia. My favourite Khatchaturian, though, is his Masquerade suite, a wonderful half-crazed dance, Slavic to the core yet evoking (and perhaps satirising) the mannered Viennese Strauss waltzes.  Masquerade is one of the pieces I can listen to endlessly without it losing its impact and charm.
 * Ralph Vaughan Williams is of course known for such overplayed delights as the Lark ascending, and for a very long time I thought his Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis was the finest music on the planet, having been introduced to it in a darkened cathedral when a world-class orchestra was rehearsing for a concert the following day, but I now prefer Tallis' original (one of nine tunes for Archbishop Parker's psalter that did not even warrant a name of its own) and also prefer Vaughan Williams' Five variants of Dives and Lazarus. Both are based on early music (a passion of mine) and I believe they were both part product of Vaughan Williams' work revising the English Hymnal.
 * Zoltán Kodály's Háry János suite is astounding, it features the cimbalom, a Hungarian form of hammer dulcimer. I don't actually care whether you like it or not, you simply have to hear it once and make up your own mind.

Comedy
A list for later work:
 * Richard Stilgoe, a serious composer but also screamingly funny and an absolute genius of improvisation, quite the most entertaining performer I've ever seen in cabaret, if you get the opportunity to see Stilgoe perform or speak anywhere I urge you to take it. Oh, and he has a Brompton.
 * The Barron Knights (birth control to ginger tom...)
 * Jake Thackrey, dour, under-appreciated in is lifetime and a tragic story
 * Flanders & Swann, at the top of the tree and always will be
 * Tom Lehrer, quite brilliantly satirical but sadly some have dated a bit