#6 (Pastoral Symphony), which is my favorite symphony of all time by any composer.
A bit of trivia - Symphony 5 and 6 both premiered at the same concert, one right before the other. It was one last farewell to the Classical Age, and then the introduction to the Romantic Age.
Beethoven’s even symphonies (with exception of 6) are the weak ones. #1 has a special place in my heart mainly because it was the first Beethoven symphony I performed in an orchestra (9th grade French Horn).
The Karajan recordings are the best. I have an autographed copy of #9 by the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. He totally ruined the march by speeding up the tempo like crazy. It was at this point I realized that the recording DOES matter (although most of those $3 Eastern-European orchestra CDs are pretty decent)
Does anyone have the guts to do a "best Mozart (42) or best Haydn (104) symphony poll?
I had to pick between 6 and 9… 6 was the one I went with today.
5 is truly magnificent but it suffers from the problem that I’ve heard it too often. 7 would be right up there except for the bumptious last movement, which seems to me an unfortunate way to end such a radiant piece of music.
I’m “meh” on the 9th, if just because that was the one all the “beginners” played when I was in orchestra in elementary school. Then again, I’ve never heard it live, in an actual concert hall, played by a professional orchestra, so that might have something to do with it. If I ever get a chance to, I certainly won’t turn it down.
I was stuck in India for a few months once with no Western Classical music but Beethoven’s 4th (BBC Philharmonics) and I must have heard it a hundred times. In the beginning I wouldn’t have rated it very high on a list like this, but it really grew on me back then, and it is now my favorite.
Just a side note, but I looked at an old piano recording the other day and I noticed the composer noted as “van Beethoven”. It makes perfect sense of course, since that was his last name: van Beethoven, not just Beethoven. Much the same as van Gogh is van Gogh and not just Gogh. It made me wonder how and when van Beethoven was shortened into Beethoven and why nobody cares about it.
I grew up with live performances by George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. It took me a while to realize that not every orchestra performed them (or anything else) that well.
Actually, I’d say the first and second sort of really were practice symphonies. From the 3d onwards, the odd-numbered ones are mostly gloomy and serious, while the even-numbered ones are chirpy and cheerful. For some reason, cheerful doesn’t seem to work as well as serious.
My housing unit in college (a student-run co-op) encouraged its residents to decorate the hallways. I was neither artistic, nor particularly musical, but I got inspired:
I checked the score to the 5th out of the campus music library, and armed with a yardstick and magic marker, I filled the space between 2 doorways (about 20 ft) with the first 12 bars of the 3rd movement.