Favorite Symphonies Quiz


Pick your favorite composer for each symphony. You can’t use a composer more than once.

Here are my answers (at least today’s answers):
Symphony No. 1: Copland
Symphony No. 2: Hanson
Symphony No. 3: Saint-Saëns
Symphony No. 4: Bruckner
Symphony No. 5: Shostakovich
Symphony No. 6: Tchaikovsky
Symphony No. 7: Sibelius
Symphony No. 8: Mahler
Symphony No. 9: Beethoven

What are your picks? I’m looking forward to learning something.
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Showing 4 responses by edcyn

mayoradamwest -- Duel!  Draw batons!  Mozart sums up the entire universe in his late symphonies, the ones from 29 onwards.  Grace, humanity & transcendent loveliness.  The earlier ones may not all be quite as transcendent but they make up for it in spirit and fun.  To me Mozart's music is like being with the most beautiful woman you've ever seen...a woman that knows how to party, too.
I’ll start with #39 -- Mozart
It doesn’t help that I’ve got a weakness for Fourths -- Brahms, Mahler, Tchaikovsky.
Fifths give me fits, too.
jdane -- I dig your choices.  Love the Schubert Fifth.  I play some of those tunes on my fiddle.  It's better than whistling 'em!  The adagio in the Bruckner Eighth has some of the most powerful moments in all of music.  The Mahler Third is a vast wonderland.  Every choral group in the land should sing "Es sungen drei Engel" at least once each Christmas.
I love Gustav Mahler for his tunes.  For the way he can evoke a time, place and mood.  For the way he creates a world you can not only see & hear, but can touch and walk around in. 


His First Symphony evokes what for me is the first day of Planet Earth.  The first movement gives us a fine summer morning.  The sun rises rises over the forest.  In the second movement, the forest's plants and animals dance, free of all care.  The third movement introduces Man, in the person of a Stone Age family arduously pushing their stone-wheeled cart.  Yes, they have an ox out front but the ox is near exhaustion.  The fourth movement is the big storm, a storm that, of course, finally, gloriously clears.

I remember putting on the Bruno Walter performance of the First Symphony during a make-out session in college.  Yeah, I won't go into details, but the girl had to admit that the music really did create a universe.