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Masterworks
Guided looks at the pieces that define the concert repertoire.
Masterworks
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony: four notes that changed everything
How a tiny rhythmic cell becomes the organising idea of an entire symphony.
Masterworks
Vivaldi's Four Seasons: music as description
What a concerto can do when it sets out to paint weather, birds and seasons.
Masterworks
Mozart's Requiem: a mass left unfinished
A funeral mass completed by others, and what that means for how we hear it.
Masterworks
Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker: from stage work to concert suite
Why a ballet score became one of the most familiar orchestral suites.
How to use this portal. Pick a composer or a single work, listen once without reading, then come back to the guide and listen again. Music rewards the second hearing far more than the first, and the vocabulary you pick up here is meant to make that second hearing sharper.