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Whenever I listen to classical music on the radio or to a CD with many different movements from various works, I always try to guess who composed it. I've found that orchestral music is by far the easiest to identify. Following that is the piano, while intimate string ensembles and instrument solos in general tend to be harder for me to identify. For example, I was listening to some string quartet in the car and thought it might have been Hadyn. It turned out to be Rossini! Now if it were an orchestral composition, I'd probably know it was Rossini in a snap. Can anyone give any tips on what to listen for to distinguish these more subtle forms of composition?

It's a matter of experience, to be honest... a lot of the time a composer would have signature styles. Bach, for example, is usually immediately identifiable through his mastery of counterpoint. Other composers, especially Romantic, are associated with a certain folk tradition: Dvorak with Slavonic music, Grieg with Scandinavian music etc.

I can usually pin the music down to the era, e.g. once I was listening to a piano ballade that I thought was Schumann, but it turned out to be Brahms. Once you leave the mainstream 'popular' composers, there is really a huge amount of music by multitudes of composers, so I usually don't bother trying to pin it down to the specific composer.

Late 19th and early 20th century composers were on a nationalism jag, mainly the eastern europeans, produced some great music, but it's highly recognizable.

Hmm, well these are useful tidbits of information I mostly already knew, but for example, how can you pick apart the differences between Donizetti's String Quartet No. 4 - I. Allegro and Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 18, No. 4 - IV. Allegro? This is what I'm talking about. I know it's difficult to express exactly the nuances of music in words. If there's anything in particular you notice that stands out which is easy to describe, feel free to point it out. If you point out a difference in tempo, I'll poke you with a stick.

Ah, yes, and these MP3s are legal.

It's just a matter of listening to a lot of different pieces. Eventually you just start to notice the ideosyncracies of each composer. It's no different from how many of us jazzers can tell John Coltrane apart from Sonny Rollins after only hearing a few measures of them play.