When Brahms composed his Second Piano Concerto in 1881, it set a new benchmark for size and scope. Scored in four movements rather than the usual three, its opening is strikingly original: a noble horn call, answered by the piano, which then launches into a mood-switching cadenza. The second movement is an impassioned scherzo, followed by an Andante whose music is based on its initial solo cello song, and a rondo finale blending playfulness with grandeur. Strauss’s Don Quixotte of 1897 is a programmatic theme and variations on the famed Cervantes novel about an elderly hidalgo who goes mad, imagines himself to be a knight errant, and sets off on adventure. Casting a cello as ‘Don Quixotte’ and a viola as his servant, Sancho Panza, Strauss’s colourful score brilliantly depicts events such as the mistaking of a flock of sheep for an enemy army (atonal baa-ing). Eventually sanity is restored, and the weary gentleman dies peacefully on a downwards glissando.