5 Minutes to Make You Love Classical Music

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Bach

Listen to all the moods from the grand master of Western classical music: consoling, rousing, peaceful, passionate.

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Baroque Music

Listen to spirited, sublime works by Bach, Handel, Purcell and more.

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Beethoven

This is the best of the stormy, tender work of the composer who changed music.

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Brahms

Listen as Carlos Santana, Branford Marsalis and others pick their favorites of the moody master of 19th-century music.

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love the Cello

What would Yo-Yo Ma, John Williams and Andrew Lloyd Webber pick to make a friend love the sweet-toned cello?

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Choral Music

Listen to the gorgeous sound of a mass of voices: ancient, contemporary, gospel, opera, sacred, romantic.

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Music for Dance

Reggae, house, step, ballet, tap, jazz: Listen to the sounds that have inspired great choreographers.

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love the Flute

It’s an instrument based on the most fundamental sign of life: breath. Listen to the best music ever written for it.

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love the Horn

Listen to music that shows off the golden, mellow sunshine of “the cello of the brass section.”

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Maria Callas

Listen to the best of opera’s defining diva, chosen by Patti LuPone, Renée Fleming, Marina Abramovic and many more.

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Mezzo-Sopranos

Listen to the warm, rich sound of Marilyn Horne, Janet Baker, Grace Bumbry and more.

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Mozart

Let Mark Hamill, Condoleezza Rice and Mitsuko Uchida be your guide to this bright, vivid master.

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Opera

Patti Smith, John Turturro and Renée Fleming chose their favorite dramatic passages.

5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the Organ

Listen to the biggest, loudest, most extravagant (yet incredibly subtle) instrument of them all.

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Percussion

Listen to the varied, explosive, resonant sounds of instruments struck, shaken, pounded, scratched.

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love the Piano

We asked Lang Lang and some other favorite artists for the piano music they’d share.

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Renaissance Music

Here’s your introduction to the shining, stirring sounds of a revolutionary period in cultural history.

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Sopranos

Hear the soaring voices of Maria Callas, Jessye Norman, Leontyne Price and Renée Fleming.

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Stravinsky

Dive into the composer who changed music history and gave Mikhail Baryshnikov “my first heady sniff of the West.”

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love String Quartets

Listen as our writers and some of our favorite artists share music of intimacy, intensity and joy.

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Symphonies

Alec Baldwin chooses Tchaikovsky. Darryl Pinckney picks Mahler. And more sweeping, powerful music.

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Tenors

Rufus Wainwright, Josh Groban, Andrea Bocelli and others choose opera’s most passionate, golden voices.

5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the Trumpet

Listen to Louis Armstrong’s sweetness, Miles Davis’s wild squall, Handel’s Baroque majesty and other favorites.

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love the Violin

We asked Hilary Hahn, John Adams and André Rieu to pick the violin sounds that move them. Listen to their choices.

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Wagner

Rian Johnson, Patti Smith, Alex Ross and others offer favorite highlights of a composer best known for his sprawling length.

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love 21st-Century Composers

Ivo van Hove, Justin Peck, Du Yun and others explore the music of today.

Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Classical Music

Some of our favorite musicians tell us about the sounds they cherish.

Discover more in classical music.

What are the five minutes you’d play to make a friend fall in love with classical music?