Chopin Quizzes!

. . . So you think you know something about Chopin?

Try your hand at these quizzes! And then there's the Chopin-specific "name that tune."

Steve Hicken's 5x5

I can't resist a quiz, especially since I should be doing a few other things at the moment. But Steve Hicken put this on his blog, so I'll make it fast.

1) What five operas would you most like to see performed?

This is a trick question for opera composers. I have written three operas and one intermezzo, which I hope to see performed while I'm still alive. You can read about them here. The other two would be Hindemith's Sancta Susanna, which was performed for the first time in New York a couple of years ago (and I only knew after the fact), and, though it is not an opera, I would love to see and hear Richard Strauss' ballet Schlagobers, a ballet that has various desserts as characters.

2) What five pieces would you most like to hear performed?

besides a few of mine . . .
Richard Peaslee's "The Devil's Herald" for tuba, four horns, and percussion
Anthiel's Ballet Mechanique
Bach's whole St. Matthew Passion
Some of Machaut isorhythmic motets
Rameau's Dardanus

3) What five living performers would you most like to meet?

Leif Ove Andsnes
David Nadien
Bryn Terfel
Michala Petri
The Leipzig String Quartet

4) What five living composers would you most like to meet?

besides Steve Hicken and some of the other composers I feel I know through the composerly blogosphere:

Garbriela Frank
Lera Auerbach
David Matthews (the British composer, not Dave Matthews)
Daniel Nelson
Deborah Drattell

5) What five living musicians (composers, performers, writers, scholars, etc) would you most like to play three-on-three basketball with/against?

I would hope to have Richard Taruskin on my team. I'm not sure if Alex Ross would be happy about playing basketball with a short woman composer. I think it would be fun to play anything, including basketball, with the members of the Liepzig String Quartet.

Oh oh, Soho, Yo-yo.

Oh dear. I feel like there might be a little friction or a little drama in the best crossover vs. worst crossover recordings answer on the Soho Quiz, and I certainly hope that my violist friends (Charles and Liz) in the blogosphere are not offended because a recording I really wanted to like turned out to be a disappointment for me.

Yes, there are worse crossover recordings. There are many of them. Probably thousands. My internal sanity-preservation machine wipes most of them out of my consciousness as soon as the recordings leave my hands and my house. I guess the recording in question is still on my shelf and still in my mind, so maybe it's not all that bad. I might even give it another listen.

Here are three alternatives that probably won't get me in trouble:

Classical Barbra, Ron Carter playing Bach Cello Suites (Michael reminded me of that one), and Diana Ross singing with Domingo and Carreras on Christmas in Vienna (the concert on TV had some selections from Handel's Messiah that they seem to have removed from the recording).

Musical Quiz from 1947

This quiz comes from A Treasury of Games, Quizzes, and Puzzles by Phyllis Frazer and Edith Young. My husband Michael refers to stuff like this as coming from "the dowdy world." Some of the questions are ridiculously simple, but some are pretty odd--especially the last one. Notice that this quiz is not labeled "classical music quiz," but simply "Musical Quiz," suggesting that general 1947 party folk in search of a good time would have considered the substance of this quiz "popular culture." (Do you think that anyone talked about "popular culture" as opposed to the other kind of culture in 1947?) At any rate, this quiz is a lot more friendly than that theory game.

You can find the answers here or leave some alternative answers (if you dare) in the comments.

Soho the Dog Quiz

Here are my answers to the Soho the Dog quiz:

1. Name an opera you love for the libretto, even though you don't particularly like the music.

Ernst Krenek's ''What Price Confidence"

2. Name a piece you wish Glenn Gould had played.

Poulenc's "Babar"

3. If you had to choose: Charles Ives or Carl Ruggles?

Ives

4. Name a piece you're glad Glenn Gould never played.

4"23'

5. What's your favorite unlikely solo passage in the repertoire?

The double bass solo in the slow movement of Mahler's First Symphony.

6. What's a Euro-trash high-concept opera production you'd love to see? (No Mortier-haters get to duck this one, either—be creative.)

Turandot with Ping, Pang, and Pong dressed as members of the Blue Man Group.

7. Name an instance of non-standard concert dress you wish you hadn't seen.

Actually it was kind of quaint, but ultimately a little disturbing: a string quartet of four teenage girls wearing white summer dresses and not wearing any shoes.

8. What aging rock-and-roll star do you wish had tried composing large-scale chorus and orchestra works instead of Paul McCartney?

Carole King

9. If you had to choose: Carl Nielsen or Jean Sibelius?

Sibelius

10. If it was scientifically proven that Beethoven's 9th Symphony caused irreversible brain damage, would you still listen to it?

I would, but I wouldn't inhale.

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