Thursday’s Prom of really rarely-heard Richard Strauss (as well as the Four Last Songs, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the BBC Singers and Vasily Petrenko are playing Strauss’s Festival Prelude and his Deutsche Motette) makes me think about the hidden sides of great composers which are all too seldom heard on concert programmes. Here’s a five-part primer of pieces we hardly ever encounter, the other dimensions of composers that posterity has decided aren’t worth the candle - but which I think we ought to hear to be truly aware that the Great Composers didn’t just write the masterpieces that centuries of canon-formation and music-historical image-making have decided are the best. Everyone has a musical twilight zone of pieces that history has forgotten, but which we shouldn’t...

Mozart, canon K231 “Lick me in the Arse”.

Seriously. Originally published in a less-offensive, redacted version, so that the song became “Let us be glad” instead of the scatological original, Mozart’s canon proves his contrapuntally scurrilous imagination in what was surely a party-piece for Wolfgang and his friends. Altogether now, “Leck mich im Arsch”...

Beethoven: Der glorreiche Augenblick

A cantata written by music-history’s supposedly greatest republican revolutionary in praise of Europe’s monarchies, and composed to impress their collective courts for the opening of the 1814 Congress of Vienna. Listen to the sound of those tubs being thumped! And some striking pre-echoes of the Ninth Symphony and Missa Solemnis, as it happens...

Wagner: American Centennial March

Is this the worst music Wagner ever wrote? Composed in 1876 to a commission from the United States to mark 100 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, this is a triumphalist tone-poem of stunning vacuity and almost incoherent rhetoric. No wonder Wagner himself said that the best thing about it was the 5,000 big ones he received for it. And to think he was composing Parsifal at the same time...

Stravinsky: Symphony in E flat

Stravinsky’s iconoclastic genius was not fully formed as a young man: here he is, in full-on Rimsky Korsakov mode, composing some of the most infectious tunes you’ll hear in a late-romantic symphony. Not that Igor was ashamed of it - and quite right too: here it is, conducted by the composer himself.

Schoenberg: Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra. A free re-composition - and improvement, as far as Schoenberg was concerned - of Handel’s Concerto Grosso, Op.6 no 7, Schoenberg’s 1933 work is one of the strangest fruits in the catalogue of the father of serialism. Schoenberg said that when he wrote this thickly orchestrated, densely contrapuntal piece, he was “intent on removing the defects of the Handelian style”. The effect is bizarre: a deadly serious neo-classicism; a modernist archiasm, or archaic modernism. Weird, occasionally wonderful, and hardly ever performed, more’s the pity.