# Symphony Cycle Selection



## SixFootScowl (Oct 17, 2011)

Not sure where I am going here, just some observations I guess. I just did an Amazon search on the this search input and looked through 4 pages of listings: Mendelssohn complete symphonies

I got about 8 different cycles to come up

Changing to Brahms yielded about 19 different cycles

But Saint-Saens only gets 1 cycle

Of course Beethoven has over 50 cycles out there (maybe 100 or more, I did not try to search it out).

So very easy to choose a Saint-Saens cycle, eh? Very difficult to choose a Beethoven cycle.

A shame that some composers' symphony cycles are so poorly represented in recordings. Of course there are other search parameters I could have used that may have yielded a few more, but I wanted to keep this simple and I think it is fairly representative of the proportions of recorded cycles for these composers.


----------



## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

As they say, follow the money. They won't record what won't sell. But companies like Naxos have been bold in this department. Naxos knew they would lose money on their Barber series, but they did it anyway.


----------



## Bruckner Anton (Mar 10, 2016)

Just check some random pages in New Grove or on IMSLP. It turns out that most composers have very few or not any of their compositions recorded and put in the market. Many works may not be that poor to be noticed. The fact is only a very small part of composers are remembered by us.


----------



## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

I seem to remember reading that a very large proportion of premieres given by major orchestras each year (99%?) are never publicly performed again.

Even Beethoven's violin concerto and 4th piano concerto sank without a trace after their premieres, until Mendelsohn revived them decades later.


----------



## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

How about ; Sibelius, quit a few choices out there .

http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/w/10275/medium-CD


----------



## SixFootScowl (Oct 17, 2011)

For what it is worth, there is a second Saint-Saens symphony cycle out there, conducted by Soustrot and on NAXOS in three separate CDs, Volumes 1 through 3. But I am sticking with the 2CD set conducted by Martinon.


----------

