The beauty and emotional power of two Brahms masterworks are breathtaking. The Violin Concerto’s sonorous passages for violin and orchestra, gorgeous melodies, and exciting solo pyrotechnics—particularly the double-stops (playing two notes simultaneously) in its thrilling finale—make it a repertoire favorite. There’s abundant melody in the beautifully orchestrated Third Symphony, too. The most compact of the composer’s four works in the form, it still carries tremendous visceral power and lyrical beauty.