Best Symphony Choral

Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 8 is a large-scale work for orchestra, vocal soloists, children's chorus, and mixed choruses, composed in 1906. Its first part sets the Latin hymn Veni creator spiritus, while its second sets the closing scene of Goethe's Faust, joining sacred and literary texts within o...

Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13 in B-flat minor, Op. 113, is a five-movement work for bass soloist, male chorus, and orchestra, composed in 1962. It sets poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, beginning with "Babi Yar," which commemorates victims of the 1941 Nazi massacre near Kyiv and condemns antisem...

Henryk Górecki's Symphony No. 3, commonly called the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, is a 1976 work for solo soprano and orchestra. Its three slow movements set Polish texts concerning separation between mothers and children, including a prison inscription written during the German occupation. The symp...

Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 14 in G minor, Op. 135, is a song cycle written in 1969 for soprano, bass, string orchestra, and percussion. Its eleven movements set poems by Federico García Lorca, Guillaume Apollinaire, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, and Rainer Maria Rilke in Russian translation. Unified...

A Sea Symphony is Ralph Vaughan Williams's first numbered symphony, completed around 1909 and first performed in 1910. It sets poems by Walt Whitman for soprano and baritone soloists, mixed chorus, and a large orchestra, treating the sea both literally and as an image of spiritual and cosmic explora...

Kullervo, Op. 7, is a large-scale work composed by Jean Sibelius in 1891 and 1892 for orchestra, male chorus, soprano, and baritone. Its five movements recount episodes from the tragic story of Kullervo in the Kalevala, Finland's national epic. Often described as a choral symphony, it established Si...

Benjamin Britten's Spring Symphony, Op. 44, is a large secular choral work first performed in 1949. Scored for soprano, alto and tenor soloists, mixed chorus, boys' choir, and orchestra, it assembles English poetry spanning several centuries into a progression from winter toward spring. Despite its...

Leonard Bernstein's Symphony No. 1, "Jeremiah," is a three-movement work for orchestra and mezzo-soprano, completed in 1942. The movements are titled "Prophecy," "Profanation," and "Lamentation," with the solo voice entering in the finale to sing Hebrew passages adapted from the Book of Lamentations...

Of Rage and Remembrance (1991) by John Corigliano is a choral symphony incorporating material from his Symphony No. 1, written as an elegy for friends lost to the AIDS epidemic.

Leonard Bernstein's Symphony No. 3 'Kaddish' (1963) sets the Jewish mourner's prayer for orchestra, chorus, boys' choir, speaker, and soprano soloist.

Philip Glass's Symphony No. 5 (1999) is a choral symphony drawing on sacred texts from multiple world religions, commissioned to mark the millennium.

A choral symphony (1925) by Gustav Holst, Op. 41, setting poems by John Keats for soprano soloist, chorus, and orchestra.