Let’s be honest: “classical music” doesn’t always sound like much fun. For many, it conjures images of stern men in wigs, concert halls filled with people in ballgowns and black tie, or the kind of music people talk about when they want to sound clever.
But classical music is so much more than the big-name composers – it’s an ever-changing, chimerical label that applies to a wide range of different pieces.
So if you think you don’t like classical music, it might just be that you haven’t stumbled across the right piece yet.
This list is here to help. The pieces that follow here aren’t the usual suspects we all know from school, or adverts, or pop culture. They range from the subtly poignant to powerfully intense; some are sad, some are joyful – and each one has been chosen for its ability to surprise and move you, regardless of whether you know your Beethoven from your Brahms.
Fauré – Dolly Suite Op. 56, I. Berceuse, 1893
If your impression of classical music is all bombast and drama, let Fauré surprise and delight you with this piece from his Dolly Suite, which he originally wrote for his mistress’ daughter when she was tiny. The suite has six pieces, which were written for Hélène Bardac, the young daughter of singer Emma Bardac, nicknamed “Dolly”, as a series of birthday gifts.
This is technically a lullaby but it’s so lovely and elegant that it’s equally good for adults.
Interestingly, it is written for four hands – that is, for two people to play together at the piano, which gives it a sense of intimacy and fun.
As you’d expect from a lullaby, there’s no big drama in the music, just graceful, delicate harmony. It’s also short – less than three minutes long, so a perfect way to ease yourself in to listening to some classical music.
Michael Nyman – The Heart Asks Pleasure First, 1993
The Heart Asks Pleasure First was composed for Jane Campion’s 1993 film The Piano. It is Nyman’s most famous work as well as a landmark in the realm of contemporary classical film music.
While the film is set in 19th-century colonial New Zealand, Nyman famously chose not to emulate the music typical of the period. Instead, he created something much more personal and emotionally intuitive, using minimalist repetition and folk-like melodies that felt timeless rather than historically correct.
Nyman based the music loosely on a piece by Scottish folk fiddler Alexander Campbell Munro, giving it a lilting, melancholic feel. It became the musical soul of the film and helped The Piano earn three Academy Awards and Palme d’Or at Cannes. The soundtrack went platinum in several countries, an unusual achievement for solo piano music at the time.
As a piece of music, it’s deceptively simple: there are no grand gestures or big breaks, just a looping melody that builds to a quiet sense of urgency. There’s a real depth of feeling to it: tender, sad and hopeful all at once, and very moving.
The title is taken from an Emily Dickinson poem and Nyman reportedly wrote much of the score before filming had commenced, which allowed Campion to shape the visual tone of the film around the music.
Philip Glass – Metamorphosis I-V, 1988
Philip Glass is a famous minimalist composer who composed the Metamorphosis suite in 1988, originally for solo piano. It consists of five pieces (Metamorphosis I-V) and was inspired in part by Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella The Metamorphosis.
There is a quiet intimacy to the suite which is incredibly beautiful. I’d suggest starting with Metamorphosis II, which for me carries the most emotional weight, but you could equally begin with I and work your way through to V – they are all wonderful.
The patterns that are repeated throughout the suite, gently evolving and shifting as the suite progresses, work in quite a different way to more traditional music with big build ups and breaks. This is much more hypnotic and inviting.
Glass’s work helped to redefine what “serious” classical music could be in the late 20th century – accessible, meditative, and emotionally direct without being sentimental. He also had a huge influence on ambient music creators, and the Metamorphosis suite is a cornerstone of that influence.
If you feel like something that’s gentle enough to sit in the background but also beautiful enough to listen to directly, and especially if you’d like to try something that rewards repeated listening, then Metamorphosis is a brilliant place to start.
Catrin Finch – Clear Sky, 2016
Catrin Finch is a Welsh harpist and composer known for her virtuosity and creativity. She was the Official Harpist to the Prince Of Wales when that title was brought back into use in the early 2000s and while she built her early career on playing as a harpist, she now also writes and records her own music.
Clear Sky is light-filled and ethereal, and very easy to listen to. There’s a sense of spaciousness to it that feels expansive and it has a free-flowing structure that helps to make it feel alive.
It’s both subtle and soulful.
Finch is heavily influenced by the Welsh landscape and Celtic folk music and mythology, which makes her own compositions a fascinating mix of the ancient and modern.
If you think of harps as being for weddings, or the things that angels play on clouds, then let Finch show you how much more there is to be found in modern harp music.
Luke Howard – The Great Longing Of An Unquiet Heart
Luke Howard is an Australian composer and pianist and The Great Longing of an Unquiet Heart is a beautiful piece that reflects themes of isolation, yearning, and unresolved emotion.
It’s built on sparse, melancholic piano figures and soft string textures with a slow, deliberate tempo. There’s a sense of waiting that permeates the whole track and the fragmentary melody on the top is gorgeous.
If you feel like something tender and soft then this is the perfect piece.
Edward Elgar – Cello Concerto in E Minor, 1919
This is a wonderful example of how classical music can be emotionally raw without being overblown. Elgar wrote this piece in the wake of the First World War, which had changed both him and the world irrevocably. Elgar had already had a thriving career in the Edwardian pre-war years and this piece marks a shift in his musical style to something more introspective and melancholic.
The premiere of the piece was a disaster due to lack of rehearsal and it was almost forgotten about for years afterwards. However, a young Jacqueline du Pré brought it back to the forefront in the 1960s, long after Elgar’s death. Her emotionally charged, technically dazzling performance turned the piece into a modern classic almost overnight, and is still considered the benchmark performance today.
For an orchestral piece, it’s quite pared down: the cello carries almost all the emotional weight, with the orchestra adding emphasis.
It’s a truly beautiful piece of music: haunting, intimate and tender.
Niccolò Paganini – Violin Concerto No. 2 in B Minor, 1826
Paganini was the original rock star of classical music, and this concerto shows why. Fiendishly difficult to play and wildly entertaining, it’s full of flair, swagger and mischief.
Paganini was notorious in his lifetime – his near-superhuman technique as a violinist, and his imposing, dramatic stage presence not only caused audience members to faint during his performances but also inspired rumours about deals with the devil. The rumours were so prevalent that he was nicknamed “The Devil’s Violinist”, and was refused a Christian burial by the Church upon his death.
He is credited with popularising the violin as a solo concert instrument in the decades after his death. He was also a gifted guitar player, and took his guitars everywhere with him when he toured, only playing them for friends and not publicly.
The concerto is in three movements; the first is a commanding, energetic opening that sets the stage with virtuosic runs. The piece then moves into a slow, expressive, and deeply emotional second movement where the violin almost sings. The third and final movement is the real showstopper, with light orchestration supporting the soloist so they can really shine. This passage went on to inspire various subsequent composers to create works based on it.
For the violinist, it’s an extremely challenging piece to play, with various techniques including double stops, ricochet bowing, left-hand pizzicato, and lightning-fast passages.
If you like music which dazzles, then try this – it might just blow your socks off.
Maurice Ravel – Boléro, 1928
This is a hugely famous and very unconventional piece that premiered to shock and surprise from audiences and caused a celebrity feud between Ravel and Toscanini, which provided plenty of gossip.
There is a (likely apocryphal) story which alleges that at the premiere, a woman in the audience shouted “He’s mad!” Ravel supposedly replied, “She understands.”
Boléro was originally written as a ballet score although it is almost always played as a purely orchestral piece. Boléro breaks all the conventions of orchestral music: there’s no thematic development, no key changes, but rather a long, slow crescendo that builds over the 15ish minutes of the piece.
Ravel famously described it as “orchestral tissue without music”.
Structurally, Boléro is extremely simple: it repeats the same two-part theme over and over on top of an unchanging snare-drum rhythm (a bolero rhythm, originally a Spanish dance form).
The interest comes from orchestration – each variation passes on the melody to a different solo instrument or group, in a gradually layering of textures. The whole piece is in the same C major key until the very end, where it modulates unexpectedly to E major in a final, dazzling crash.
What makes it compelling isn’t what changes, but how it changes: flute to clarinet to saxophone (unusual in an orchestral piece for the time) to full brass, with the underlying rhythm unchanged throughout.
While it might be minimalist in structure, it’s maximalist in terms of impact and very, very fun.
Listen to it as loudly as you dare, all the way through – it’s worth it.
Gustav Holst – The Planets, 1914-17
Inspired by his new interest in astrology, Holst composed The Planets during the First World War: each movement is named after a planet and its associated Roman god. He described the suite as “a series of mood pictures” intended to act as foils to one another.
Remarkably, he was working as a schoolteacher at the time of writing, composing in his spare time.
Holst died in 1934, but The Planets went on to have a huge influence on rock music in the later half of the 20th century, from The Beatles to King Crimson, and of course on music used in cinema too.
When the suite premiered in 1918, conducted by Adrian Boult, it became an immediate hit. The suite contains seven movements – there was never a movement for Earth, and Pluto hadn’t yet been discovered.
- Mars, the Bringer of War – a brutal 5/4 march, full of dread. You can trace a direct line from this to the music of cinema in the later half of the 21st century, especially the music that scores sci-fi and fantasy battle scenes. What’s most astonishing about it is that it was written so long before films had sound, so Holst was onto something startlingly original for the time, even though the style feels so familiar to us now.
- Venus, the Bringer of Peace – a delicate, shimmering, slower piece that is a deliberate counter to Mars. There is a part for the harp and for the celeste, which both lend it a dreamy quality.
- Mercury, the Winged Messenger – this piece is fleet-footed and mischievous, full of flickering motifs that seem to dodge and dart around.
- Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity – this somehow manages to be joyful and strong, while also being deeply moving. Some of the melody was later adapted into a patriotic hymn.
- Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age – this slower and feels more serious, with a gravity that prompts a surprisingly emotional response.
- Uranus, the Magician – this piece is a musical trickster. If you ever watched the Sorcerer’s Apprentice when you were a child, it might feel familiar but it has much more swagger and lots of changeability.
- Neptune, the Mystic – this feels more mysterious, like something suspended in time. It ends with a wordless female chorus fading into silence, who traditionally would be placed outside of the main concert hall/stage and in a side room so that they were invisible to the audience and felt more mystical.
Holst uses quite a few unusual instruments, and lots of them, alongside dynamic contrasts to evoke the character of each planet. It’s a beautiful and cinematic suite which really shows the power of an orchestra – and where, despite using such a large orchestra, nothing is wasted or frivolous.
Ralph Vaughan Williams – The Lark Ascending, 1920
To round out our list, let’s finish with something softer and gentler. The Lark Ascending is poetry in musical form – it was inspired by George Meredith’s poem of the same name.
This is a wonderful example of how music alone can conjure a picture in your mind. The lark of the poem is represented by the violin, and you can almost see the bird flying up into the sky above the English countryside as the music paints the picture for you.
Vaughan Williams started composing the piece in 1914, then went to serve as an ambulance driver in the First World War. When he returned home he reworked it, and the result is a poignant expression of peace, innocence, and the fragile beauty of nature in the shadow of conflict.
The piece opens with the violin alone, as the lark takes off in flight. There’s no fanfare, no introduction, just nature and the sky. It feels timeless and subtle – there’s nothing flashy about it – it’s a great contrast to the Paganini piece – but requires great control from the soloist. There are no sudden shifts or bursts of drama, but rather a sense of stillness and transcendence, with the orchestra providing a grounding for the flight of the violin.
If you want something that has a gentle sense of rapture, or that evokes a pastoral ideal, then this is the piece for you.
Classical music isn’t just one thing – it’s a whole universe of music, sprawling across centuries and styles, shaped by love, war, invention, and obsession. You don’t need to understand it to enjoy it (although once you start enjoying it you’ll probably also start understanding it).
Whether you found yourself floating with Vaughan Williams’ lark, laughing with joy at Paganini’s showmanship, or coming undone by Elgar’s cello, I hope this list has helped you find something new to explore and to enjoy. Happy listening!
Image: Gordon Johnson