Most of Bach's compositions were for choir or organ (he wrote for his church choir one cantata a week for an incredible number of years!).

The six Brandenburg Concerti are among his relatively few works for an orchestra ensemble. The fifth is one of the most popular. You hear in it a lot of what people expect in baroque music--a great deal of energy, intricate interweavings of melodies, but not a lot of variety in volume (a narrow dynamic range). This is in part a matter of taste and in part a matter of the capabilities of such important baroque instruments as the harpsichord: volume was increased by increasing the number of notes played simultaneously, not by varying the force with which a single note was played.

The concerto has three movements (middle movements of concerti are usually slower or sadder or more pensive) with short pauses between each

The work Mozart himself called "A Little Night Music" is probably his most popular orchestral work

You hear in it the purity, beauty, and balance of tone for which he is so worshipped and the sweetness and happiness he sought to make central to all his music

The serenade has four movements. I don't know if you'll be able to detect from the pauses the switch from one movement to the next, but the third movement is often played independently--when, say, moviemakers need a minuet playing while be-wigged figures dance

I've always liked this overture, written just a couple of months before Mozart's death

By the way--my CD's liner notes say that the orchestral overture to operas was devised as a way to silence the audience. Singers were complaining that chatter was drowning out their first lines!

Not an overture to an opera but to a play for which Beethoven wrote the incidental music

The "Egmont Overture" is one of Beethoven's two most popular overtures. The other ("Leonore 3") is in the all-Beethoven set.

Beethoven gets short shrift here, but maybe even this short work will show just what a radical departure from Mozart he made. Beethoven created the Romantic period in music.

That single dramatic chord starting the overture, by the way, is something people point to as "typical Beethoven", "a Beethoven hallmark", etc.

The University of Breslau gave Brahms an honorary doctorate in 1879, and this was his thank you. (They'd hoped for a major symphony, of course.) This is a collection of German student songs (including "Gaudeamus Igitur") and is somewhat lighter weight than most of Brahms' works. It's also probably his best-known work.

Brahms' "Tragic Overture" would have been more representative here, but I don't have a good recording of it.

This is not one of Wagner's famous overtures or operas, but it is one of the loveliest. (It also shows how a great composer can get away with an opening that sounds for all the world as if he's tuning the orchestra.)

Wagner's operas are often jokingly spoken of as symphonies. They have relatively few of the set vocal pieces (arias) that people associate with operas. In most operas, there's just enough sung dialogue to advance the plot from one aria to the next. Wagner's operas are mostly sung dialogue, with a much richer orchestral part than other opera composers produced.

Debussy's own description of the work: "The music of this prelude is a very free rendering of Stephane Mallarmé's beautiful poem. It does not purport to contain everything that is in the poem. It is rather a succession of settings through which the faun's desires and dreams move in the course of that hot afternoon. Then, weary of pursuing the fearful nymphs and naiads, he abandons himself to the sunlight's intoxication, filled with dreams finally realized, of total possession in al all-embracing nature."

Debussy sought to free the music from the mechanisms. His instructions for his suite "Pour le piano" call for "freeing the music from the keyboard", trying to make the listener forget the source. His music generally lacks the explicit structure of earlier compositions--it's usually very easy to listen to but hard to orient oneself in--but is full of interesting textures and colors.

All the same--he himself despised and reject the label "impressionist".

I've nothing appropriate from the modern period that will fit here, so, making a virtue of necessity and all that, back for one last look to

This may be his most popular overture (and raciest opera!)