I grew up in New York, but I haven’t lived there in decades. I actually had to do some research on the city! It was embarrassing as a native New Yorker to be reduced to using the Web and watching movies to draw a picture of New York today. I hope I got it right...

You can find the Paganini Caprice No. 24 in A Minor , as played by Itzhak Perlman, at the iTunes Music Store. There are several other performances available as well.

Paganini wrote the Caprices as practice pieces for himself and other violinists. The theme of the No. 24 in A Minor became the basis for works by other composers, most notably Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (here played by Artur Rubinstein). Most of the variations are so short that they fit within the 30-second preview of the iTunes Music Store, so you can get an idea of what the entire piece sounds like.

The Bach A Minor Violin Concerto (BWV 1041) is also available in recordings by Itzhak Perlman , Gidon Kremer , and others.

You can find the Beethoven Violin Sonata No. 2 in A , as played by Michiko Kamiya and Ian Brown, at the iTunes Music Store.

The Brahms Violin Sonata No. 2 is available in a recording by Anne-Sophie Mutter and Alexis Weissenberg, as well as others. The Dvořák Sonatina in G is available in this performance by Qian Zhou and Edmund Battersby. They are both lovely pieces.

There is nothing quite like Gilbert and Sullivan (I think of them as a 19th century musical version of Monty Python). You can find the title song for this chapter here .

There are several recordings of Schubert’s “Trout” quintet available at the iTunes Music Store. There are two versions with Emmanuel Ax and the Guarneri Quartet , one with Alfred Brendel , and more.

Two conductors I like for Brahms’ fourth symphony are Kurt Sanderling and Carlos Kleiber. Sanderling’s version is only available as part of a set of all the symphonies , while Kleiber’s is available on a single CD along with Schubert’s 8th (“The Unfinished”) and some Wagner.

Again, there are several recordings of Mozart’s well-known Clarinet Quintet (which was even featured on an episode of the TV series M*A*S*H!) available through iTunes. The Emerson string quartet has one (a double-bill with Brahms’, two of the top clarinet quintets) , and there is also an historic recording with jazz great Benny Goodman as the clarinetist!

I went to graduate school in Cambridge and remember Boston fondly. There’s even a song about the MBTA !

There are so many recordings of The Four Seasons that I’m not sure which to suggest. The ones by Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg , Itzhak Perlman , Anne-Sophie Mutter , and Takako Nishizaki all look like good choices.

I hope I got the state of the Big Dig in 2004 approximately correct. I haven’t been to Boston in a long time...

Again, there are multiple recordings of the Dvořák cello concerto. I have this one , but there are other good ones. There are two interesting versions of the Saint-Saëns violin sonata No. 1, this one and this one . There are several recordings of the Mendelssohn trio No. 2 ( and among others), plus a live recording with Martha Argerich .

There are many recordings of the Brahms sonatas for violin and piano, including the D Minor. I have this one from Anne-Sophie Mutter, but there are recordings from Itzhak Perlman , Pinchas Zukerman and more.