Cocktail Party Fact: A dark, even tragic work considered by many to be the composer’s greatest symphony. Dvorak himself intended the piece to be “something that would shake the world.”

Commitment Factor: About 37 - 40 minutes

Vital Statistics: Romantic Period (1885). A four-movement symphony of incredible strength and tension. Unusually for symphonies in classical form, there are no literal repeats in the outer movements. The argument proceeds in one, unbroken flow–a lesson not lost on Brahms when he was composing his own Fourth Symphony contemporaneously.

What to Listen For: The music is highly concentrated–there isn’t a note out of place in this symphony, and it’s hard to pick out “highlights” when the argument proceeds with such inevitability. The tragic climax of the first movement and the subsequent quiet ending are immediately arresting; the scherzo (joke), while not based on the rhythm of a Czech folk dance, is the composer’s most haunting and passionate. As for the slightly sinister finale, its coda carries grandeur without a trace of pomposity.