Cocktail Party Fact: Originally conceived as a traditional four-movement symphony, it was reworked by Jean Sibelius into its present three-movement form; but you can still hear the original scherzo in the finale of the first movement.
Commitment Factor: About 32 minutes.
Vital Statistics: Late Romantic Period. After the Second, Sibelius’s most popular symphony.
What to Listen For: [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: In the months after undergoing surgery for a throat tumor, plagued with financial difficulties and filled with anxiety over his country’s political future, Jean Sibelius composed this famously gloomy symphony .
Commitment Factor: About 35 minutes.
Vital Statistics: Late Romantic/Early Modern Period. A symphony in the traditional four movements.
What to Listen For: The [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Jean Sibelius composed his Third Symphony on a commission from the British composer Granville Bantock. Although premiered in Finland, it was performed in London soon afterward with Sibelius conducting, thus beginning England’s long national obsession with the Finnish master.
Commitment Factor: About 26 minutes.
Vital Statistics: Romantic period. A symphony in three movements.
What to [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Music Critic and Composer Virgil Thomson called this most popular of  Sibelius’ symphonies “hopelessly provincial.”
Commitment Factor: About 40 minutes
Vital Statistics: Late Romantic/Early Modern Period (1902). A four-movement symphony with the last two movements attached, taking a cue from Beethoven’s Fifth.
What to Listen For: The first movement is a very interesting piece in [...]

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: This symphony was written at the same time as the First Symphony, but Schumann revised it later so it got an updated number. No one believes these revisions were an improvement on the original.
Commitment Factor: About 30 minutes
Vital Statistics: Romantic Period (1841). Schumann’s most radical symphony: although in four movements, he directs [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: The title refers to the Dusseldorf, the city by the Rhine where Schumann was engaged as a conductor of the town orchestra. He was, by all accounts, a really lousy conductor, and he had eight children to support.
Commitment Factor: About 35 minutes
Vital Statistics: Romantic Period (1850). This is, unusually, a five-movement symphony, [...]