Ives' Symphony No. 4

Charles Ives' Symphony No. 4 is the classic mash-up of 19th century Americana: hymns, anthems, marches and dance tunes all woven together in a collage that is by turns messy, complicated, sentimental and chaotic, but ultimately transcendent—kind of like life itself.

Mahler's Symphony No. 4

Mahler's sunny Symphony No. 4 ends with a song—a child's description of heaven. But it is also full of reminders of the vastness of his musical universe.

Ives' Symphony No. 3, "The Camp Meeting"

Charles Ives' music is the archetypal "mash-up" of classic Americana. His Symphony No. 3 was inspired by the gentler, more spiritual side of the religious revivals he attended with his family as a child.

Bernstein's "The Age of Anxiety," Symphony No. 2

Leonard Bernstein based his Symphony No. 2 on W.H. Auden's Pulitzer Prize-winning poem The Age of Anxiety. Auden didn't think much of the work, but for Bernstein, it was very personal.

Shostakovich's Symphony No. 1

Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his first symphony while he was still a student, but it contains all of the elements of his mature work: the comedy and the tragedy.

Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra

Witold Lutosławski was one of the great cultural figures of 20th century Poland, and his Concerto for Orchestra– based on a simple folk tune –was one of his first great successes; perhaps because his personal history mirrored that of his native land.

Janáček’s "Taras Bulba"

Leos Janáček based his rhapsody Taras Bulba on one of the most brutal and unpleasant fictional characters ever created. But as a political symbol, it inspired him to write some of his most powerful music.

Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10

Shostakovich's 10th Symphony is a vivid depiction of a life of not-so-quiet desperation in the old Soviet Union. It is as powerful a portrait of terror as has ever been composed.

Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique

A man spots a woman across the room at a party and falls instantly in love with her. In a fit of despair over his unrequited love, he poisons himself and fantastic dreams and visions result. This is the story, inspired by his own love for the actress Harriet Smithson, that Hector Berlioz portrays in his Symphonie fantastique, premiered in 1830. Using recurring musical motifs to represent characters and brand new instrumental colors, Berlioz worked on foundations laid by Beethoven to bring music fully into the Romantic era.

Bartók's Piano Concerto No. 2

Following the relative unpopularity of his Piano Concerto No. 1, Bela Bartók returned to his roots for the composition of his next piano concerto, which he called an “antithesis” to the first. This second concerto takes more of a classical form, with a sonata structure and a simpler treatment of the themes. Bartók was well-versed in this kind of writing, having himself made several student editions of music by Bach, Scarlatti, and Couperin. Despite the more traditional form, Bartók’s Concerto No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra still maintains the folk music-infused sonorities that have been a consistent hallmark of his music.

Bernstein's "West Side Story"

Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story received its first Broadway performances in 1957. The musical tells the story of an impossible romance between two star-crossed lovers, Tony and Maria, the Romeo and Juliet of 1950s New York City.

Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet

Inspired by a stage performance of Romeo and Juliet starring the same Harriet Smithson who inspired his epic romantic tale Symphonie fantastique, Hector Berlioz set out to compose a totally new kind of orchestra and chorus work: his Romeo et Juliette. In the forward to what he was careful not to call an opera but a “symphonie dramatique,” Berlioz tells of his decision to voice to the characters’ most intimate and sublime emotions not through words but “instrumental language, which is richer, more varied, less fixed, and by its very flow incomparably more powerful.” From the starting Allegro, depicting the warring houses of Montague and Capulet, to the Finale’s oratory oath of reconciliation, this work uses the (then new) language of programmatic orchestral writing to tell the oldest love story in the world.

Ives’ "The Unanswered Question"

In The Unanswered Question, Charles Ives tries to find the meaning of life, in a work that was decades ahead of its time.

Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1

Beethoven's first piano concerto took Vienna by storm, and set the stage for even more musical revolutions to come.

Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring"

Listen to a podcast of audio program notes about the The Rite of Spring, specially prepared for the San Francisco Symphony’s Stravinsky Festival in June 2013.

Vivaldi's "Four Seasons"

Barking dogs, wind and rain, buzzing bees and slippery ice; they're all part of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, a work that—believe it or not—was almost unknown for 200 years.

Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5

Perpetually self-conscious, Tchaikovsky worried in spring 1888 that his imagination had dried up, and that he had nothing left to express through music. Vacationing at his home in Frolovskoe provided all the inspiration he needed, and by August, his Symphony No. 5 was complete.

Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 3

Scotland—the country that gave us haggis, bagpipes, golf and Sean Connery among other world treasures—was also the inspiration for two of Mendelssohn's best-known works: his Hebrides Overture and Scottish Symphony. There are no actual Scottish tunes in the Symphony; in fact, Mendelssohn professed to dislike all Scottish music, especially the bagpipes. But it's hard to imagine the source of this tuneful work being anything other than the windswept heather of the Highlands.

Berlioz's Requiem

The power of Hector Berlioz's Requiem comes not from his faith, but from his loss of it. His understanding of the human desire to believe brings the drama of the Mass for the Dead to life.

Debussy's "La mer"

During childhood summers spent at the beaches at Cannes, Debussy learned to love the unpredictable and ever-changing sea. The most traditionally ‘symphonic’ of Debussy’s orchestral works, La mer is comprised of three sketches: From Dawn to Noon on the Sea, Play of the Waves, and Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea.

Strauss' "Aus Italien"

Richard Strauss was just 22 when he wrote his musical travelogue Aus Italien, and—as he put it—"This is the first work of mine to have met with opposition from the mob, so it must be of some importance . . . The first step towards independence."

Mahler's Symphony No. 1

Audiences were outraged at Mahler's Symphony No. 1 when it premiered in 1889; they had never heard anything like it. But he himself said "My time will come." And it certainly has.

Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 2

Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote his Symphony No. 2 while living in Dresden. At age 33, he was a sought-after conductor and pianist, and had relocated to escape the clamor for his talents. After completing the work, he declared he would never write another symphony, and waited almost thirty years to do so.

John Cage's "The Seasons"

John Cage's ballet music The Seasons gurgles, twitters and shimmers with the sounds of nature, and—just like the first day of Spring—it was the first sign of a new type of artistic collaboration.

Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra

After fleeing Hungary during World War II for the United States, Béla Bartók was commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony, to write a piece for orchestra. This resulted in one of Bartók’s best-known works, the Concerto for Orchestra, which contains a parody of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7.

Beethoven's Symphony No. 7

The premiere of Symphony No. 7 was perhaps Beethoven’s greatest rock-star moment. Buoyed by the excited troops in whose honor the concert was being performed, he “tore his arms with a great vehemence asunder ... at the entrance of a forte he jumped in the air” (according to orchestra violinist and composer Louis Spohr).

Beethoven's "Coriolan" Overture

Beethoven was, at heart, a man of the theater, and his overture to the play "Coriolan" is one of the most vivid, concise and dramatic character studies ever composed.

Brahms’s Symphony No. 4

Ever the brutal self-critic, Brahms did not write his first symphony until the age of 42. By the time he wrote his Symphony No. 4 in 1885, he had reached the pinnacle of his orchestral composition—the music he had always wanted to write.

Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6

Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony was not his farewell statement, although at the time of its first performances it may have seemed like one. What it did do was explore new depths of emotion, even for a composer used to wearing his heart on his musical sleeve.

Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet"

Following multiple failed agreements with various ballets (including the Bolshoi, which declared the music impossible to dance to), Sergei Prokofiev reduced what would eventually become his most popular ballet to three orchestral suites. Described by Michael Tilson Thomas as "a great lyrical symphonic epic," the work uses character and emotional motifs to capture the dramatic action in Shakespeare’s classic love story.

Brahms's Symphony No. 3

After composing Serenade No. 1, Johannes Brahms waited fifteen years before he wrote another purely orchestral work for large ensemble. Infamous for his harsh self-criticism and haunted by the feeling that he was living in Beethoven’s shadow, Brahms finally broke his symphonic silence at the age of forty-two with the Haydn Variations, a musical experiment with the arrangement of sonic shapes. By the time he composed his Symphony No. 3, ten years later, he had fully realized his true voice as a symphonic master.

Beethoven's Symphony No. 9

Often called the greatest piece of music ever written, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 was the last he would ever write. The first symphony to feature a chorus and vocal soloists, Symphony No. 9 also includes the famous Ode to Joy.

Kodály’s "Dances of Galánta"

In his "Dances of Galánta," Zoltan Kodály recreated the sounds of his childhood, and helped preserve the stamping feet of a vanishing culture.

Beethoven's Symphony No. 4

Despite his family’s financial turmoil, the year 1806 was extraordinarily productive for Beethoven. He wrote many of his great works, including the Razumovsky string quartets, Piano Concerto No. 4, and Symphonies No. 4 and 5. Symphony No. 4—a return to the grace and relative simplicity of his earlier style—is perhaps Beethoven’s least frequently performed symphony. A passage in the middle of the second movement was called “one of the most imaginative passages anywhere in Beethoven” by musicologist Donald Francis Tovey.

Mozart's Symphony No. 36

Mozart wrote his "Linz" Symphony in just four days, but it was his biggest and grandest to that point, and it helped set the stage for the great symphonies of the 19th century.

Mahler's "Blumine"

Gustav Mahler revived one of his earliest compositions to use in his first symphony; he ultimately cut it, and it was forgotten for almost sixty years. Now, one hundred years after it was written, this musical orphan finally has a chance to bloom on its own.