Wikipedia:Today's featured article/June 19, 2010

A choral symphony is a musical composition for orchestra, choir and sometimes solo voices, which in its internal workings and overall musical architecture adheres broadly to symphonic musical form. The term "choral symphony" in this context was coined by Hector Berlioz (pictured) when describing his Roméo et Juliette in his five-paragraph introduction to that work. The direct antecedent for the choral symphony is Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which is the first example of a major composer's use of the human voice on the same level with instruments in a symphony. A few 19th-century composers, notably Felix Mendelssohn, Berlioz and Franz Liszt, followed Beethoven in producing choral symphonic works. In the 20th century, notable examples were composed by Gustav Mahler, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Igor Stravinsky, Benjamin Britten, and Dmitri Shostakovich among others. The final years of the 20th century and the opening of the 21st century have produced several additions to the genre, among them compositions by Tan Dun, Philip Glass, Hans Werner Henze and Krzysztof Penderecki. (more...)

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