Cocktail Party Fact: Premiered and broadcast at the height of the Second World War, the limpid beauty of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ 5th Symphony had the effect on listeners huddled in air raid shelters of, in the words of one Londoner, “a reassuring hand on one’s shoulder.”
Commitment Factor: About 38 minutes.
Vital Statistics: Modern Period. A [...]

Committment Factor: About 32 minutes.
Vital Statistics: Modern Period. A symphony in four movements.
What to Listen For: Audiences expecting anything like the meditative beauty of the composer’s 3rd Symphony were stunned by the 4th. The first movement opens in a mood of apoplectic rage: you can practically see the composer’s fist in your face. The [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Everyone knows that the premiere in Paris of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on May 29, 1913, provoked a full-scale riot in the audience, complete with fist fights. But how many people know that little Maurice Ravel stood there in the midst of the chaos, shouting “Genius! Genius!” at the stage?
Commitment Factor: [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Dmitri Shostakovich composed this symphony during the Siege of Leningrad in World War II, in which he served as a volunteer fireman. A picture of the composer in his fireman’s hat made the cover of Time magazine around the time Toscanini gave the symphony its media-hyped American premiere.
Commitment Factor: About 75 minutes.
Vital [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Dmitri Shostakovich produced a series of mildly modernist works which Stalin took a disliking to. Fearing for his life (this was during the purges of the 1930s), Shostakovich composed this work, which he called “A Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism.”
Attention Factor: About 45 minutes.
Vital Statistics: Modern Period. A symphony in four [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Realizing that this sort of modernist music had fallen into ideological disfavor, Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich withdrew his 4th Symphony before its premiere. When asked if he wanted to make any changes in it when he finally released it for performance 25 years later, he said, “Let them eat it.”
Commitment Factor: About [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Toward the end of his life, Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich revealed that the second movement of this symphony was a portrait of Joseph Stalin.
Commitment Factor: About 50 minutes.
Vital Statistics: Modern Period. A big Mahler-ian symphony in four movements.
What to Listen For: The high drama of the first movement is followed by [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: The instantaneous notoriety of Maurice Ravel’s Bolero was mind-boggling. Not long after its 1928 premiere, Ravel was vacationing in north Africa and overheard a villager whistling the Bolero theme.
Commitment Factor: “Fifteen minutes of orchestra without music.” — Maurice Ravel
Vital Statistics: Modern Period. It’s fashionable to show one’s good taste in classical [...]

Commitment Factor: About 30 minutes.
Vital Statistics: Modern Period. One of Prokofiev’s most popular and listenable works.
What to Listen For: The first movement has a sonata-allegro feel to it, but without elaborate thematic development. Listen for the amazing toccata-like piano passage that introduces the recapitulation: it will reappear at the very end of the movement [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Martinu hesitated about calling this work a symphony, and originally planned to use no less than three pianos in the orchestra. The “symphony” in the title stayed, but the pianos went entirely, making it the only Martinu symphony without one.
Commitment Factor: About 30 minutes
Vital Statistics: Modern Period (1951). This is a three-movement [...]