If the symphony is now regarded as the genre to which composers turn if they wish to make a Statement, this is largely thanks to Beethoven. Haydn (and, to some extent, Mozart) had left it as a work around which a concert programme could be built, but Beethoven’s, imbued with their creator’s force of personality, demanded attention like never before.

Most subsequent composers with an important number of symphonies to their name typically took a little while to build up to this standard: Schubert’s true voice arguably didn’t emerge until his No. 8, Unfinished, and while Mahler’s No. 1 bears many of the hallmarks of his style, it is easily eclipsed by his No. 2, Resurrection. Brahms got around the issue by biding his time before composing his own No. 1, while many other shied away from the genre altogether, preferring to turn their attentions to something less imposing.

The titles of some of these works conjure up images of a scaled-down symphony. This is certainly true of the sinfonietta, where the addition of a diminutive to the Italian word sinfonia suggests something more light-hearted. It would be wrong to suppose, however, that these works are any easier to perform: Poulenc’s Sinfonietta, for instance – a work the Orchestra performs in Gloria! (9-10 October) may veer towards the flippant, but requires a lot of concentration from its players!

We should also mention any symphony whose title implies something smaller-scale, such as Gounod’s Petite Symphonie (actually written for wind nonet) and Britten’s Simple Symphony for strings, based on music he had written as a child. The addition of an appropriate adjective can do a lot to temper audience expectations, and these works are all the more charming for their unpretentious nature.

There is no substitute, however, for using a different name altogether to show how far removed from the symphony proper a piece of music can be. There’s a certain of amount of crossover between the likes of the divertimento and serenade, both consisting of anything from four to ten movements, generally alternating fast and slow, a pattern sometimes broken up by the inclusion of a minuet or other dance.

Let us start by looking at their roots in the Classical era. The serenade’s origins as a nocturnal piece sung at someone’s window spilled over into its recasting as an instrumental work, often also intended for outdoor performance. (Britten would later play on this by selecting poetry on the subject of night for his Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings.) This may account for the number of serenades written specifically for wind instruments, whose sounds carry more easily in the open air than strings, but there are exceptions – not least one of Mozart’s most beloved works, the serenade for string orchestra better known as Eine kleine Nachtmusik.

Besides sonic considerations, cellos and double basses being less portable than their wind counterparts meant that string ensembles were better suited for indoor entertainment. In this context, the divertimento was expected to provide unobtrusive accompaniment at social functions – not to belittle one Mozart wrote for winds, the Divertimento in B-flat which the SCO Wind Soloists play in this Summer Tour (11-14 June), which is a good deal more than musak! That said, this disregard for the genre may explain why it all but died out in the 19th century, as composition became a more serious business, though it would go on to enjoy a minor revival in the 20th century, for instance in Stravinsky’s Divertimento from his ballet Le baiser de la fée or Bartók’s Divertimento for Strings.

The serenade had, by this point, more or less ousted the divertimento, moving firmly indoors during the Romantic era, when those written for strings – by Dvóřak (as played by the SCO Strings in their appropriately-titled Summer Serenade concerts (12-14 June), Tchaikovsky, Elgar and Wolf (Italian Serenade) – fast became mainstays of their repertoire. There would also be examples for larger orchestras, including by Smyth and Sibelius, though the best-known are probably Brahms’ pair.

Composed to all intents and purposes as part of his self-imposed preparation for writing a symphony, Brahms nonetheless stuck to the loose structure of the Classical model. Both include at least one minuet and scherzo, and end with a crowd-pleasing rondo. Beyond this, an interesting feature is their instrumentation: the first was originally scored for a mixed wind-and-strings nonet, and there are no violins in the second.

Today, these lighter alternatives may not rank as highly in general estimation as the symphony, but they certainly have their place in concerts. As in so many other respects, variety is the spice of life, and it does no harm to have an equally mixed musical diet: could we really consider the serenade and leave out Glenn Miller?