Cocktail Party Fact: Up until 1950, The Four Seasons was the only Vivaldi composition most people had heard of. Vivaldi had written hundreds of concertos, but his works dropped out of sight until a big cache was discovered just before World War II and published in the years after the war.

Commitment Factor: About one hour

Vital [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Royalty’s greatest enemy was boredom. When the king of England decided to go on a little boat trip down the river Thames, Handel composed this music for the occasion, to be played from a musician’s barge floating alongside the king’s. Now of course, we just take along a boom box.
Commitment Factor: About [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: The King’s fireworks party was a bust: something blew up prematurely, and set the staging platform on fire. Everyone fled the ensuing conflagration.
Commitment Factor: About 20 minutes
Vital Statistics: Baroque Period (1749). This is a Baroque suite, or “Overture,” consisting of a large opening movement in slow-fast-slow form, and then a series of [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: The oldest national anthem, God Save the King, came into use in the 1740’s. Audiences have been standing up for the Hallelujah Chorus longer than they’ve been rising for all the currently recognized national anthems.
Commitment Factor: About two and a half hours
Vital Statistics: Baroque Period (1740). Approximately forty-five choruses, solos, duets, and [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: The Concerts Royaux entertained Louis XIV near the end of his reign, when he was coping with two hardships: military defeat and an exceptionally pious wife.
Commitment Factor: About ten to eighteen minutes per suite
Vital Statistics: Baroque Period (1715) Four suites composed for Louis XIV’s Sunday chamber concerts. Each suite includes a prelude [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Only three Bach violin concertos survive, two for a single violin and orchestra, and one for two violins. However, almost all of his harpsichord concertos were originally written for the violin as well, and later adapted.
Commitment Factor: About 12 - 15 minutes per concerto
Vital Statistics: Baroque Period (1723). Concertos in the three [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: This work (and most everything else by Bach) remained virtually unknown until Mendelssohn rediscovered it in the 1830s, leading to the Bach revival that continues to this day.
Commitment Factor: In a good performance, about 3 to 3-1/2 hours. In a dull performance, forever.
Vital Statistics: Baroque Period (1729). A sacred oratorio (a story [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: The Third Suite contains the famous “Air on a G-String,” which Bach did call an “Air,” but it isn’t played on the G-string of the violin. This was a later arrangement made during the Romantic period, over a hundred years after Bach wrote it.
Commitment Factor: About 20 - 25 minutes per suite.
Vital [...]