Lots of good advice above, but here’s one suggestion based on each of the discs you currently have:
You should try some Bach - The Brandenburg Concertos are a good starting point, I would avoid von Karajan in that case. Pinnock would be good. His orchestra uses instruments similar to those around in Bach’s time. Also Bach’s cello sonatas (best late at night).
Also some Schubert - Symphony 8 (Unfinished Symphony) and/or 9. Or his Trout Quintet (so-named because he borrows music from a song he composed called The Trout. Carlos Kleiber recorded a great version of Schubert’s 8th. Maybe Munch with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the 9th.
And Chopin - Almost all of his music is for piano - mostly shortish works. See if you can find an album sampling the different types: waltz, nocturne, mazurka, etude, etc. I bought a sampler of Claudio Arrau’s Chopin in the early days of CDs. Then I bought the box.
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Yes - and Bach’s Orchestral Suites, too.
Orchestral Suites - I have Hogwood & the AAM, on Decca
Brandenburg Concertos - I have Goodman & the Brandenburg Consort on Hyperion.
YMMV…
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That should be Bach Cello Suites. He wrote some sonatas for cello and keyboard as well. They’re fine, but not astonishing the way the solo Suites are. Every cellist worth their salt has recorded them. Janos Starker’s recording for Mercury has always been considered an audiophile treasure, but that means you are unlikely to find a copy in the budget bin.
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If you try Bach’s cello suites and enjoy them, do buy Stephen Isserlis’s book about them. He’s a professional cellist who’s played them for years and writes about them very engagingly.
Mark
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Far too much emphasis/reliance on Karajan in that list!
The (solo) Cello Suites are extraordinary, visionary music, years ahead of the time Bach wrote them.
But the six Solo Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin are more amazing still. Completely timeless music - you would never guess, just from listening to them, that they were written over three hundred years ago.
Nathan Milstein recorded them for EMI in the 1960s, but came out of retirement in about 1990 to re-record them for DGG, a set that was reissued on vinyl in a ‘worldwide limited edition’ of 1,600 copies a couple of years ago. You may still find a copy of the 3LP set with a specialist classical music shop, but don’t hang around.
Don’t forget the French, beginning with the radical Claude Debussy and the supreme orchestrator/colourist Maurice Ravel.
Listening to Ravel after a load of Teutonic dribble or brown ‘n’ sludgy Romantic music is like moving from a tatty black and white print on a tiny TV to a glorious, blazing 70mm Technicolor transfer on the big screen.
You’ve clearly never listened to Carlos Kleiber conducting Beethoven, Brahms or Wagner!
Listening to music from different countries is definitely a good idea. (Not just France 
).
Try and pick up this box set. Probably peanuts on eBay. Ten records highlighting music styles from different countries. Good sound quality as well.
I clearly have, I hate Wagner, dislike Brahms intensely but like Beethoven (also Bach, Mozart, Haydn and Händel); I’m much more of a Francophile when it comes to music.
AND I have seen Carlos Kleiber conducting, in Vienna in the 1980s, at a New Year concert.
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We are getting into personal opinions now.
Maybe we should save recommendations concerning specific pieces of work by specific conductors for the general classical music thread. Not the novice classical music thread.
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I may be wrong but I thought most of the Karajan references were from the OP’s 2nd hand vinyl purchases.
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I haven’t so thanks for the recommendation but I don’t think you can make assumptions about others.
I was going to suggest some Wagner symphonies yesterday, either 2 or 4 which are polar opposites but equally emotive for me. Others will have far better knowledge than me, but the OP wants to discover classical music, arguments about the best interpretation or recordings can potentially come later and would be part of enjoying the genre too.
That may be, but it doesn’t make them worthy of recommendation to others.
Again, I may be wrong or may have misread but think Ebor put recommendations in in bold type amidst the OP’s list of purchases.
Do you object to Herbert von Karajan generally, or just in some of those specific examples? Just interested.
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He did some things very well, particularly in his early years in Vienna and as de facto joint chief conductor of London’s Philharmonia Orchestra (with Klemperer).
But, once he took over as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, he got lazy and virtually omnipotent, ignoring his recording producers and engineers - with the result that the sonic quality of his recordings dropped alarmingly. (Amusingly, the cover art on his LPs took a similar steep drop in quality, increasingly becoming photographs of Karajan - a man short in stature - as some sort of superhuman.)
He made five (or was it six?) recordings of the Beethoven symphonies, and the sound of each was progressively worse than its predecessor - his last, for Sony laserdiscs, being sonically horrendous.
(If you want to have a Karajan Beethoven Symphony cycle, buy his first Berlin/DGG set from 1963. It is the one that I have, on very well pressed LPs from DGG for a recent re-release.)
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Thanks for the explanation. Could the later artwork depicting him perhaps have been driven by the studios and their ‘media teams’ rather than by the man himself I wonder?
I think there was a time when you couldn’t seem to move for DG/HvK releases, and while some of his recordings may have introduced me to various works (and I’m still fond of some of these), I’ve certainly found better recordings of many of them in recent years thanks to streaming.
I dare say I probably listen to many works which purists or connoisseurs would potentially dislike but if the music resonates with you on an individual rather than a purely cerebral basis that may not matter.
Was it partly due to the shift to digital I wonder, things I often enjoyed on CD in the 80s now seem quite harsh and sterile compared to older recordings.
If he didn’t listen to producers and sound engineers and insisted on ‘his sound’ that’s a real shame.
Karajan was a megalomaniac and an unapologetic member of the Nazi Party (as indeed was E Schwarzkopf). How they both got through the de-Nazification process after WW II is beyond me.