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:

Strauss Four Last Songs Chandos CD with soprano Felicity Lott (plus a selection of Strauss’s other orchestral songs)
and a
Boosey & Hawkes Strauss Masterworks full score (including Four Last Songs, Oboe Concerto and Metamorphosen)

Total prize value £30.49 (Approximately 60 USD / 38 Euros)

• What do Rheinberger’s Eighth Organ Sonata (1882) and Brahms’ Fourth Symphony (1884) have in common, apart from the key (E minor)?
  
  
• Which German-Danish dynasty of composers boasts a J. P. E., an Emil, an August Wilhelm and two Johann Ernsts?
  
  
• Who was the first composer to write a string quartet in each of the 24 major and minor keys?
  
  
• Under what pseudonym did George Bernard Shaw write much of his music criticism?
  
  
• What –ism got the composers Michael Tippett and Ronald Stevenson thrown into prison?
  
  
• Why was so much Classical orchestral music written in D major?
  
  
• Name two “western” composers born in China.
  
  
• What links the musicals Song of Norway and Kismet and the operetta Lilac Time?
  
  
• Who instructed the composers working for him that they were not to write minor chords?
  
  
• How many overtures did Beethoven compose for his opera Fidelio?
  
  

Email your answers to competitions@boosey.com

Closing date: 30 September 2008

June/July Competition

Congratulations to Dr Walter Schneider of Houston, USA who won our June/July competition.
He has received the prize of a CD and score of Elgar's Sea Pictures.

Questions and Answers:

• Spring, Dance, Dollar, Gothic, Inextinguishable: the names or nicknames of exemplars of which musical form?
  The symphony: the Spring Symphony is Schumann’s First; Aaron Copland wrote his Dance Symphony in 1929; Kurt Atterberg’s Sixth Symphony was nicknamed the “Dollar Symphony” after it won a lucrative competition in 1928; The Gothic (1919–26) is Havergal Brian’s First Symphony and The Inextinguishable (1914–16) Carl Nielsen’s Fourth.
  
  
• Which Czech-born composer and youthful friend of Beethoven could count Liszt, Franck, Halévy, Onslow, Farrenc and Gounod among his students?
  Antoine (Anton, Antonín) Reicha (Rejcha; 1770–1836) – at the age of 15 he played flute in the electoral orchestral in Bonn, next to Beethoven in the violas. He later became an important teacher at the Paris Conservatoire.
  
  
• What do the composers Francesco Rossi, Giuseppe Verdi, Carl Czerny and Nicola Porpora have in common?
  Their surnames signify colours: red, green, black and purple.
  
  
• Why did Mozart favour the key E flat major for his Masonic works?
  Because of its key-signature of three flats: three is a number with many symbolic associations in Masonry.
  
  
• 24 of which instrument played for King Charles II?
  Violins: in 1660 he established a court ensemble which took the name “The 24 Violins of the King”.
  
  
• 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?
  Elisabeth Schwarzkopf
  
  
• Which composer is the world’s most prolific symphonist?
  The conductor Leif Segerstam (b. 1994): by April 2008 he had reached No. 193, with Nos. 194–200 in progress.
  
  
• On which island do the inhabitants whistle at the edge of the world?
  
The inhabitants of El Hierro, the most westerly of the Canary Islands (considered by Ptolemy and Pliny to be the end of the known world), communicate using “El Silbo”, a whistled language that allows them to “speak” over the island’s huge deep ravines and valleys.


• What is distinct about each of Shostakovich’s fifteen string quartets?
  Their tonalities: each is in a different key.
  
  
• What unites the passacaglia and chaconne of classical music and the pibrochs played by Scottish pipers?
  They are all sets of variations built on a ground, a simple tune presented at the beginning of the piece.
  
  

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

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