Cocktail Party Fact: If you remember the “Marlboro Man” and the music from the film “The Magnificent Seven,” check out the very end of this symphony–you’ll be surprised by what you hear.
Commitment Factor: About 35 minutes
Vital Statistics: Modern Period (1942). A four-movement symphony with the scherzo placed second, rather than third, as is traditional.
What [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Mahler conducted this work in Vienna several times, and although he was not thrilled with its programmatic intent (to tell a story), the influence of its orchestration shows clearly in his later work.
Commitment Factor: About 18 - 20 minutes
Vital Statistics: Romantic Period (1896). The piece is essentially a funeral march with a [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: The music follows the story of this folk ballad so closely that in places you can actually set the words to the music–in Czech, of course!
Commitment Factor: About 18 - 20 minutes
Vital Statistics: Romantic Period (1896). The form of this symphonic poem is a rondo: an orchestral refrain with interludes that takes [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: The folk ballads from which the four symphonic poems of 1896 take their inspiration are the Czech equivalent of Grimm’s Fairy Tales–and if you’ve ever read the original Grimm, you know that they can be pretty gross.
Commitment Factor: About 13 - 15 minutes
Vital Statistics: Romantic Period (1896) This is a mini-symphony in [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: This is the only symphonic poem I know which ends happily, even though the main character is murdered and dismembered. See below for the shocking details.
Commitment Factor: About 25 - 28 minutes (there is a cut version of about 16 minutes–avoid it)
Vital Statistics: Romantic Period (1896). The form is totally free, following [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: The famous tune in the slow movement became the Spiritual “Goin’ Home”–though many believe the symphony borrowed the tune, and not the other way around.
Commitment Factor: About 40 minutes
Vital Statistics: Romantic Period (1893). This four-movement symphony employs cyclic form: all of the tunes from the first three movements reappear in the finale.
What [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Sometimes called the “English” Symphony, because it was published there after the composer had a falling out with Simrock, his German publisher.
Commitment Factor: About 35 to 40 minutes
Vital Statistics: Romantic Period (1889). A standard, four-movement symphony in form, but Dvorak’s most original symphony in content.
What to Listen For: The first movement is [...]

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 [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: This is the one major work of Dvorak that clearly owes a debt to Brahms–in this case his Second Symphony, with which it shares both key (D major), and mood (check out the finales of both).
Commitment Factor: About 40 - 45 minutes
Vital Statistics: Romantic Period (1880). A standard, four-movement symphony with a [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: The structure of this symphony clearly inspired Brahms’ Third (a symphony also in the key of F major), a fact which most musical scholarship, which is heavily Germanic in its bias, continues to ignore, preferring to believe that the influence worked solely in the other direction. Not so: it was a two-way [...]