Have fun testing your classical music knowledge with our regular competitions. The first entry picked with correct answers will win both a CD and score of the listed work(s).

Prize for this competition:

Elgar Sea Pictures Naxos CD with Sarah Connolly and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (also includes Elgar’s The Music Makers)
and a
Boosey & Hawkes Elgar Masterworks full score (including Sea Pictures, Cockaigne Overture and Pomp & Circumstance Marches Nos.1-5)

Total prize value £28.98 (Approximately 57 USD / 37 Euros)

• Spring, Dance, Dollar, Gothic, Inextinguishable: the names or nicknames of exemplars of which musical form?
  
  
• Which Czech-born composer and youthful friend of Beethoven could count Liszt, Franck, Halévy, Onslow, Farrenc and Gounod among his students?
  
  
• What do the composers Francesco Rossi, Giuseppe Verdi, Carl Czerny and Nicola Porpora have in common?
  
  
• Why did Mozart favour the key E flat major for his Masonic works?
  
  
• 24 of which instrument played for King Charles II?
  
  
• Which German soprano raised eyebrows when the eight pieces of music she chose for the BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs were all her own recordings?
  
  
• Which composer is the world’s most prolific symphonist?
  
  
• On which island do the inhabitants whistle at the edge of the world?
  
  
• What is distinct about each of Shostakovich’s fifteen string quartets?
  
  
• What unites the passacaglia and chaconne of classical music and the pibrochs played by Scottish pipers?
  
  

Email your answers to competitions@boosey.com

Closing date: 31 July 2008

April/May Competition

Congratulations to Thomas Dawkins of Concord, USA who won our April/May competition.
He has received the prize of a CD and score of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

Questions and Answers:

• Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony famously ends with a series of emphatic chords from the full orchestra. Which other Nordic symphony – by a composer born in the same year as Sibelius – begins with a sequence of powerful orchestral chords?
  Carl Nielsen’s Third Symphony, the Sinfonia espansiva
  
  
• How many symphonies did Sibelius in fact compose (excluding different versions of the same work)?
  Nine: the seven numbered symphonies, the early Kullervo and the Eighth, which was completed before Sibelius called it back from the copyist and burned the manuscript
  
  
• Which composer celebrated the pines, fountains and festivals in the capital city of his native land?
  Ottorino Respighi
  
  
• Who wrote a piano piece depicting the rage caused by a lost penny?
  Beethoven
  
  
• The band played on, they say, as the Titanic went down – but what was the final hymn they played?
  “Nearer, my God, to Thee”
  
  
• Of which composer was Tchaikovsky talking when he said “I’ve played through some of his piano music. What a giftless bastard”?
  Brahms
  
  
• Name two composers other than Puccini who wrote an opera called Turandot.
  Ferruccio Busoni and Havergal Brian
  
  
• How many keyboard sonatas did Domenico Scarlatti compose – and in which country?
  555, in Spain
  
  
• Which contemporary English composer recently completed Elgar’s Third Symphony by “elaborating” Elgar’s sketches for the work?
  Anthony Payne
  
  
• Which 19th century keyboard piece instructs the performer to play “As fast as possible” and, a little later, “Even faster”?
  Schumann’s Second Piano Sonata, Op. 22 (first movement)
  
  


Thanks to all the entrants – we hope you had fun puzzling out the answers. Please enter our newest competition above.

View our Terms and Conditions