Chopin’s first piano concerto also exists in an arrangement the composer made himself—replacing the orchestra with a string quartet.

And he’s not the only composer who’s taken one of his orchestral works and downsized it for solo, quartet, or chamber ensemble—or ‘upsized” a keyboard piece into a large-scale work for full orchestra.

And while the transformation itself certainly draws our attention—it also tells us something important about how music is made—from the ground up.

In this hour, we’ll explore how Chopin, Beethoven, Rimsky-Korsakov, Ravel, and others re-worked some of their most familiar pieces.