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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 5 responses by mayoradamwest

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mayoradamwest
430 posts
 
‘Very few bettered Mozart. ‘
Um, not to me. Mozart symphonies are a snooze. His operas slightly better. I would think most boring classical music listeners would contend Beethoven perfected the symphony. Regardless, I find them boring, especially to perform. Listen to Haydn 104 then Tchaikovsky 4, and I just can’t see how anyone who has any ability to emote would pick Haydn. 
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mayoradamwest
430 posts
 
1: Mahler
2: Mahler
3: Mahler
4: Tchaikovsky
5: Mahler
6: Mahler
7: Mahler
8: Bruckner
9: Mahler

i don’t care about the use a composer more than once rule. Who can really pick their favorite Mahler? It’s usually either 2,3,5,6,9 - whichever I happened to have listened to or performed most recently. 
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mayoradamwest
430 posts
 
@twoleftears that’s fair about 4. I do like it. But I also love Tchaikovsky 4. The whole thing is a bit contrived. Mahler makes it unfair for works like Sibelius 2, Rachmaninov 2, Brahms 1, Shostakovich 5 (and 7), etc. and then of course why stop with numbers? How about Strauss’ tone poems like Alpine Symphony and and Ein Heldenlaben. 
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mayoradamwest
430 posts
 
@edcyn sorry, not for me. Nothing Mozart ever wrote, to me, rivaled the finale of Mahler 2. There are videos of the end nearly bringing Bernstein to tears conducting it. Not so with Mozart. Or how about Mahler 5, mvt 4 - probably the most beautiful movement of any symphony ever written. 
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mayoradamwest
430 posts
 
When you speak of emotion in Mozart, it cannot be measured by 19th century standards. He was, to me, the most “human” of all composers.

*eye roll* I get it, you like Mozart. Whatever. Calling him the most "human" is like calling the number 5 the most "5" of all numbers. Were the others part cyborg? Oh please.
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