Cocktail Party Fact: One of the main themes of the slow movement bears a striking resemblance to a prominent tune in Richard Strauss’ much later “Alpine Symphony.” Check ‘em both out for yourself.
Commitment Factor: About 25 minutes
Vital Statistics: Romantic Period (1868). One of the most popular violin concertos–and the only one with 2-1/2 movements.
What to [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Written for his close friend, the violinist/composer Joseph Joachim, this is the last great concerto to leave room at the end of the first movement for the soloist to improvise a cadenza (based, we hope, on the movement’s main themes). Modern performers can select one of many cadenzas previously composed (including one [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: I added the brackets in the title. Brahms got it wrong. The theme isn’t really by Haydn, though it’s a great tune all the same (it even has its own name: the “St. Anthony Choral”).
Commitment Factor: About 20 minutes
Vital Statistics: Romantic Period (1873). A theme (in two parts, both repeated thus: AABB), [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Brahms’ most colorful symphony orchestrally speaking, this work was unpopular with audiences for many years after its premiere.
Commitment Factor: About 40 minutes
Vital Statistics: Romantic Period (1885). A four-movement symphony with some interesting features: there are no literal repeats anywhere, and the finale is powerfully tragic in tone (in both cases, Brahms probably [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: It’s commonplace in music history to speak of Dvorak’s debt to Brahms, but no one ever mentions what Brahms owed his Czech friend. This symphony is one example, being essentially inspired by Dvorak’s Fifth, with which it shares both key and overall conception (a major-key symphony with a turbulent, minor key finale).
Commitment [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Brahms carried this symphony around with him for something like 20 years before getting up the courage to perform it. Believe it or not, the tremendous introduction to the first movement, with its pounding timpani and mysterious suggestions of tunes to come, was added as an afterthought.

Commitment Factor: About 45 minutes
Vital Statistics: [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: After completing this piece, Brahms wrote to a friend: “I have just completed a teeny, tiny piano concerto with a teeny, tiny, wisp of a Scherzo.” This is, of course, the longest piano concerto in the entire standard repertoire.
Commitment Factor: About 47 - 50 minutes
Vital Statistics: Romantic Period (1881). Most concertos have [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Never conventionally religious (he started life as a whorehouse pianist working the Hamburg docks), Brahms at one point thought of removing all reference to God from this piece and calling it “A Human Requiem.” Nevertheless, he knew his Bible well enough to select the texts for this work himself.
Commitment Factor: If you [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: In Goethe’s original poem, Faust is saved in the end. Berlioz prefers to save Gretchen (Marguerite), and leave Faust in hell, for which he composed an entire scene in nonsense syllables supposedly representing the Satanic language. It’s a scream.
Commitment Factor: A bit over two hours
Vital Statistics: Romantic Period (1846). No one is [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Probably the first piece of music to illustrate a drug trip. Berlioz depicts a young man infatuated with a woman who does not return his love, so he takes opium and has a series of hallucinations in which he pictures his beloved in a variety of contexts: a ball, in the countryside, [...]