Take five: my favourite symphonies

Mark Elder named the five symphonies that changed musical history; here are my own picksBeethoven 9Yes, it's the chorus, of course, and the entire universe of the secular, the sacred and the joyous that Beethoven composes in the finale. But it's really the first movement that does it for me, a musical creation myth of vast emptinesses, overwhelming momentum, and one of the blackest, funereal codas ever written.Brahms 4The symphony as proto-postmodern palimpsest: the baroque, the romantics, the s...

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