Top 6 Tributes

In another edition of our occasional parlour game this evening, it's a specific kind of tribute that I'm looking for. The strict qualification is that the author and subject must both be fully vetted, approved and endorsed as personal favourites and the work must be worthy, too.
For example, most of Ian McEwan's books are upstairs so he's in, Hamlet is the piece in any genre I've seen most often and is obvious but Nutshell was ingenious but not really McEwan's best work, I didn't think, so it's not in.
The idea came from being prompted to go back to Sean O'Brien's The Drowned Book in which his poem celebrating Thom Gunn appeared. That captured the spirit of the poet, one of the ways he was set apart from others, and that suggested my theme.
Josquin Desprez is the poster boy of renaissance polyphony and a major, miniature masterpiece is the Deploration sur la mort de Johannes Ockeghem, the most plangent and immediately heart-breaking thing one is ever likely to hear, with Ockeghem plenty respected enough not to be merely endorsed by being allowed in on Josquin's coat-tails. I worry that such heartbreak is quite so gorgeous. It shouldn't be, should it. It should leave you without answer, but us aesthetic types, we worry less about such things in our comfortable chairs. We prefer to beautify pain and enjoy it.
Anybody of my generation needs to have David Bowie automatically on any roll call of essential artists and The Velvet Underground occupy a position all of their own in my pantheon of pop idols so Queen Bitch, David's pastiche on the work of Lou, walks confidently into this selection.
Errollyn Wallen gained a position something like my favourite living composer a couple of years ago and her use of Purcell's lament in Dido & Aeneas in making In Earth is one of the many and varied things that make her so, with Purcell more than qualified by being a candidate for England's greatest ever composer.
Julian Barnes has eased his way to eminence as England's finest fiction writer, for me, in recent years and The Noise of Time, his compelling account of the local difficulties encountered by Shostakovich in Stalin's Soviet Union, provides us with a novel. Shostakovich, with special reference to the string quartets, has been a hero since I was a teenager and it's only the forbidding challenge of his vast symphonies that prevent him from being the natural choice of greatest C20th composer. That is, my only doubt comes from the fact they seem too big for me. But, blimey, Shostakovich. First name on the team sheet, almost.
So, I'm left needing a painting, if only to establish the breadth of my catholic, liberal and all-encompassing height of good taste. I'm not sure if anybody is cited in Vermeer's paintings beyond a back view of himself. But here comes Maggi when you need her. Maggi Hambling, for who the honour of 'national treasure' would be kept specially for had it not been handed out quite so rashly once the phrase had become an easy, devalued compliment. Max Wall, George Melly, even Amanda Barrie are much admired subjects of hers but not strictly on any list of people I consider my own. Oh, but Stephen Fry, like Hamlet or Bowie, surely belongs to all of us.
So, there's 6 and I don't think I can improve on them much for further thought.

Cover versions kept springing to mind but that's a different game. We can save that for later.