For beginners, off the top of my head, I'd say some of the most approachable pieces, orchestral, are
Vivaldi concertos
Mozart piano concertos
Mozart symphonies, 40, Prague, Jupiter
Beethoven symphonies 3,5,6,7 and 9
Dvorak From the New World symphony
Tchaikovsky 5,6 symphony
Brahms variations on a theme by Haydn
Schoenberg Transfigured Nights
Stravinsky Firebird Suite
Mussorgsky Night on Bald Mountain
Holst The Planets
Copland Appalachian Springs
Who played them best? Who has the best recording? (Not just the ones you mention here, but any other good composer.)
IMO that's at least an intermediate consideration. If you don't know anything about the piece, how are you going to determine if it's played well?
But a couple things...first, I disagree with the audiophilists. Unless you're in a quiet room doing nothing else, earbuds and mp3s are fine. Say you fall love with something big, like Beethovens ninth. At that point you might want to explore different performances on quality systems. But to survey, no, I wouldn't bother.
Another thing - if you're walking or driving or if there's any other noise around at all, avoid digital recordings. The dynamic range is too wide, requiring constant adjusting, or else either the pianissimos are inaudible or the fortissimo s blast your head off. Analog recordings are compressed, and much better for less than ideal settings. Relatedly, when looking for performances, stick the classic names that keep coming up: Ormandy, Szell, Von Karajan. Pianists Serkin, Gould, Casadesus, Rubenstein etc, if it's an old and famous name, start with that.
Now an exception to the above, for me, is Baroque music(can't be too simple, can we). Baroque music on modern instruments, except piano, I find distracting. And original instrument recording didn't come into its own until the digital age. But again, that's the result of many years of listening. A newcomer might not notice or care. But for me, no vibrato on the strings, fur crissake!
