If you like Bon Jovi, try Tchaikovsky

If you like Bon Jovi, Journey, arena rock

try Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5

Arena rock is built on a big tune, a slow build, and a chorus the whole room shouts. Tchaikovsky wrote the template: one dark march of a theme that returns in the finale as a blazing anthem, with the brass playing the part of the crowd. If you want the fist-in-the-air moment, it is the last three minutes.

If you like Taylor Swift

try Schubert: Symphony No. 8, "Unfinished"

Songwriting that turns a private feeling into a melody everyone can sing was Schubert's whole gift; he wrote six hundred songs before he was thirty-one. The Unfinished Symphony is those songs at orchestra scale: two movements, every theme a tune you could hum on the way out, and an ache under all of it.

If you like Beyoncé

try Ravel: Boléro

A single groove, fifteen minutes long, that never changes speed and never stops getting bigger, passing the melody from one instrument to the next until the whole orchestra is on it. It is a show-stopper built the way a great stage number is built, and it ends the way the best ones do.

If you like Kendrick Lamar, Nas, lyric-first hip-hop

try Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5

Music written under surveillance, saying one thing to the authorities and another to the audience, with the double meaning as the point. The finale sounds like a victory march and is not, and everyone in the hall in 1937 knew it. Hip-hop listeners who care about what is being said between the lines tend to get this piece fastest.

If you like Metallica, Tool, heavy riffs

try Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring

Stamping, off-beat, brutal, and a hundred and ten years old. The Rite is the origin of the riff as a weapon: a chord hammered eight times with accents in the wrong places, an orchestra used as a drum kit. The first audience rioted. Metallica has played with an orchestra twice; this is the piece that explains why it worked.

If you like Radiohead, Sigur Rós, atmospheric rock

try Debussy: La mer

Texture over tune, colour over chord, music that hangs in the air rather than marching forward. Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood has spent a career on the composers who followed Debussy. Start with the sea: three movements of shimmer, swell and a storm.

If you like Coldplay, U2

try Sibelius: Symphony No. 2

Wide-open, hymn-like, building toward a finale where one huge melody rises out of the strings and keeps rising. It is the sound of a stadium anthem written for a country that wanted its independence, and the last five minutes have the same lump-in-the-throat lift as the encore.

If you like Adele, big ballads

try Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2

The most sampled classical piece in pop: "All by Myself" is its slow movement, "Full Moon and Empty Arms" is its finale. Heartbreak at full volume, a piano against an orchestra, melodies that go straight for the chest. It is the ballad before there were ballads.

If you like Billie Eilish, Lorde, quiet intensity

try Mahler: Symphony No. 4

Mahler at his most intimate: sleigh bells, a violin tuned wrong on purpose, a slow movement that barely breathes, and a soprano singing a child's view of heaven at the end. Music that whispers and still fills the room.

If you like Daft Punk, house, techno

try Adams: Short Ride in a Fast Machine

A woodblock ticking like a click track, brass fanfares stacking up over it, four minutes that accelerate without changing tempo. Minimalism is the classical branch that discovered the loop, and John Adams is where it got euphoric. Try Steve Reich next.

If you like Hans Zimmer, film-score fans

try Holst: The Planets

Every space-movie score comes from here. "Mars" is the Imperial March before Star Wars; "Jupiter" is every triumphant ending. Seven movements, one for each planet, and a full orchestra doing everything an orchestra can do. If you already like film music, this is the piece that shows you where it learned it.

If you like Miles Davis, jazz

try Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue

Jazz and the orchestra shaking hands in 1924, opening with a clarinet wail that still sounds like a dare. Then Ravel's Piano Concerto in G, written after he toured America and heard the same music. Both sit happily on a jazz listener's ear because they were built from it.

If you like Johnny Cash, Americana

try Copland: Appalachian Spring

Open fifths, a Shaker hymn, the sound of a lot of sky. Copland invented the musical language every western and every American documentary borrows, and this is the piece where he did it. Twenty-five minutes, plain-spoken and generous.

If you like The Beatles

try Mozart: Symphony No. 40

Perfect short melodies, one after another, nothing overstaying its welcome, and a restlessness under the charm. McCartney has said the Beatles learned counterpoint from Bach; the melody-per-minute rate they aimed for is Mozart's.

If you like Pink Floyd, prog rock

try Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique

A concept album from 1830: an artist takes opium, dreams of the woman he loves, murders her, is executed, and ends up at a witches' sabbath, all in five movements with a recurring theme. It has offstage bells, a guillotine, and a tuba playing a hymn for the dead. Prog before prog.

If you like Bruce Springsteen

try Dvořák: Symphony No. 9, "From the New World"

A composer from somewhere else, homesick, writing about America with more love than most Americans manage. Working-class tunes, a slow movement that became a hymn, and a finale that runs like a freight train. Springsteen fans tend to recognise the territory.

If you like Fleetwood Mac, singer-songwriter harmonies

try Brahms: Symphony No. 3

Brahms is the composer of the perfect inner voice: melodies that sit under other melodies and make you feel the harmony before you notice it. The third movement is a song without words that has been borrowed by a dozen pop ballads. Warm, autumnal, over in forty minutes.

If you like Frank Ocean, R&B, late nights

try Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 2

The sunrise at the start is the most beautiful five minutes in the orchestral repertoire, a slow flood of light in the strings with birds in the winds. Sensual, unhurried, gorgeous in the way the best slow jams are.

If you like Musical theatre

try Bernstein: Symphonic Dances from West Side Story

The obvious bridge, and still the best one: the show's music without the words, played by the size of orchestra Bernstein always heard in his head. Finger snaps, the mambo, "Somewhere". Then try his Candide Overture, four minutes of pure joy.

If you like Video game soundtracks

try Wagner: The Ring Without Words

Themes for every character and object, returning and transforming across a sixteen-hour story: that is a video game score, and Wagner did it first. The orchestral condensation gives you the whole Ring cycle's best hour, with the Ride of the Valkyries and the funeral march.