Guess the Music!

Guess the music and the performers

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1. You’ll recognize the work, since this is the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, but who’s performing it?

• Is this Fritz Reiner leading the Chicago in a large, old-style recording?
• Is this John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique in a period instrument recording?
• Is this Roger Norrington and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra in a performance informed by all of Norrington’s research into historical performance techniques?
• Is this the young Gustavo Dudamel in his first recording with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela?

2. Hector Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique is a work that paints pictures of all aspects of life, from a ball to a hanging, from lying bed dreaming to a scene in the countryside. Which movement is a horror show of skeletons, witches, and ghouls?

I. Rêveries – Passions
II. Un bal
III. Scène aux champs
IV. Marche au supplice
V. Songe d’une nuit du sabbat

Extra points: Whose recording is this?

• Roger Norrington leading the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra
• Leonard Slatkin leading the Lyon National Orchestra
• Rafael Kubelík leading the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra
• Michael Tilson Thomas leading the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra

3. What work evokes the Romantic ideals of the dead beloved, the hero’s guilt for her death, the visitation of the supernatural and ‘defiant humanism’? It’s based on a poem by Lord Byron.

• Xavier Montsalvatge: Manfred
• Schumann: Manfred, Op. 115: Overture
• Tchaikovsky: Manfred Symphony, Op. 58
• Carl Reinecke: King Manfred, Op. 93: Overture

4. The Gregorian requiem chant, the Dies Irae, is used in 19th century symphonic music to evoke musical imagery of death.

Anonymous: Dies irae (Pro Cantione Antiqua; Mark Brown, cond.)

Which work by these composers incorporates the chant?

Hector Berlioz:
Symphonie fantastique
• Harold en Italie
• Roméo et Juliette

Franz Liszt:
Totentanz
• Faust Symphony
• Les Preludes

Gustav Mahler:
Das Lied von der Erde
• Symphony No. 2, movements 1 and 5
• Symphony No. 4, movement 4

Gustav Holst:
• A Winter Idyll
The Planets, V. Saturn
• St. Paul’s Suite




ANSWERS:

1. Roger Norrington and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra in a performance informed by all of Norrington’s research into historical performance techniques

2. V. Songe d’une nuit du sabbat, with Roger Norrington leading the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra

3. Tchaikovsky: Manfred Symphony, Op. 58

4. Hector Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique
Franz Liszt: Totentanz
Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 2, movements 1 and 5
Gustav Holst: The Planets, V. Saturn

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