May I just add for completeness that for me the continuing lack of consideration for classical music is most disappointing, if somewhat expected. I'm always harbouring a silent hope that the issues below may one day get fixed by a new version of iTunes, and I had a glimmer of hope when Apple Music was announced, but alas it wasn't to be.
The way iTunes views music in terms of song/artist/album seems fundamentally incompatible with the way classical music is referred to. Here, the primary determinants are – in decreasing order – composer, work, movement, performer (which can be an attribute of either work or movement). There are albums, too, of course, but when they contain more than one work by a composer they are always compilations, assembled by the label or performer. They represent the physical recordings as sold on CDs or LPs and are somewhat orthogonal to the way classical music is viewed and organised.
Works very frequently consist of multiple movements or parts. Those end up being referred to as songs in iTunes (regardless of whether anybody actually sings). There are literally thousands of movements called I. Allegro in my library, hundreds by certain single composers alone. Artists in iTunes lingo are always the performers of a work on the given recording, which often leaves you in the dark as to who the composer is when tracks are playing. For example, right now on the Classical radio station there is a piece playing called Violin Concerto in E Minor Op.64: II. Andante. The also displayed album name is Mendelssohn & Bruch: Violin Concertos, artist is Nigel Kennedy. This is both too much and not enough information. The song name is way too long, and if you haven't heard the violin concertos by Mendelssohn or Bruch before you're left guessing which composer's piece you're listening to.
The song/artist/album tagging scheme leads to absurdly long movement names sometimes, when the tagger tried to work around this deficiency and encode everything into the title: Bach: Concerto In D Minor For 2 Violins, BWV 1043, "Double" - 2. Largo Ma Non Tanto. All of that is the song title.
There is a composer tag that can be used for searching, making playlist etc., however it is never shown in any Now Playing display, on any device.
What is sorely missing is another level of hierarchy, for the work. When shuffling classical music it would be desirable to shuffle by work, not song. When searching for works it would be desirable to get a list with works intact, in the right order, they way they were recorded, not a jumbled up and out of order list of movements from various recordings of the work (most classical music lovers own multiple recordings of the same works made by different performers).
What is the chance of this ever getting fixed? Very small.
I have taken to manually editing tags to conform to a scheme I made up for my own use, making use of the song name, artist, album, album artist, composer and grouping tags. This has served me reasonably well for years (apart of the manual effort of editing each and every track's tags), but with the advent of iTunes Match this has become a futile effort, since Match overwrites or wipes out tags of many (but not all) tracks indiscriminately, of albums I ripped myself from CD and manually tagged afterwards. Needless to say that the iTunes tagging is of poor quality, with lots of errors in spelling and fact, and of course not containing the information I had in my manual tags.
I don't see many people complaining about classical music being a square peg into the round hole that is iTunes, but it sure is causing me a lot of frustration.
