I'll go mostly with the obvious:

1. Beethoven
2. Haydn
3. Mahler
4. Brahms
5. Bruckner
6. Schubert
7. Dvorak
8. Tchaikovsky
9. Shostakovitch
10. Hovhaness... or maybe Rachmaninoff, Szymanowski, or Zemlinski... or even Henze.

Scriabin? Scriabin? Not flogging that dead horse again.

Aha, I didn't recall that. And no, I did not bother sifting through all of the older posts to see if he had been mentioned. I was going from pure memory.

I've been listening to quite a bit of Nielsen the past week in an effort to become better acquainted with him. A great symphonist, I must say. I admire his sense of drama AND concision, which is important within a symphony. It's the sense of structural control that sets a symphony apart from being a more rhapsodic, free-form work, and in this regard Nielsen is superior to the likes of a Mahler.

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"Music is not philosophy." --Akira Ifukube

1: Beethoven
2: Mahler
3: Haydn
4: Tchaikovsky
5: Bruckner
6: Ives
7: Brahms
8: Sibelius
9: Schubert
10: Hovhaness

Who else is just as worth mentioning? Let's see:

Boccherini
Dittersdorf
Liszt (probably already had a few honorable mentions but I thought I'd toss his name out there again because of the Dante Symphony)
Alfredo Casella
Raviji Shankar (he wrote several sitar orchestra pieces and was one of the few to do it so very well)
Chandrakantha (one of Shankar's great contemporaries)
Luciano Berio
Johann Jakob Froberger
Stenhammar
Heller
Louis Vierne (his work with the organ is more than worth mentioning)


That's all I could come up with for now.

__________________
"Your mathematics are correct, but your physics are abominable..." Einstein

Hmm it seems that you simply define symphony as an orchestral work? You have also said that Scriabin wrote 5 symphonies though usually only three of them are considered symphonies, and Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus are counted as symphonic poems. I doubt Shankar made actual symphonies?

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear enough. He wrote several actual symphonies, but they were intended for the Shankara Orchestra, which means Sitar, Tabla, Vocals, Sarod, Sarangi, Tanpura, Santoor, Veena, Bansuri, Shenai, etc. But yes, they are indeed symphonies.

Hello everyone, I'm new here.....

But I thought I'd make this my first post......

The 10 greatest symphonists for me are:

1. Mahler
2. Brahms
3. Beethoven
4. Sibelius
5. Tchaikovsky
6. Bruckner
7. Dvorak
8. Schubert
9. Haydn
10. Mozart

but I would imagine the general consensus would read something like

1. Beethoven
2. Brahms
3. Mahler
4. Mozart
5. Haydn
6. Tchaikovsky
7. Dvorak
8. Sibelius
9. Bruckner
10. Berlioz

something like that?

Here is my list. Though this could change at any time:

1. Bruckner
2. Mahler
3. Sibelius
4. Brahms
5. Tchaikovsky
6. Dvorak
7. Rubbra
8. Vaughan Williams
9. Shostakovich
10. Myaskovsky

Hadyn
Mozart
Beethoven
Schubert
Brahms
Bruckner
Dvorak
Mahler
Tchaikovsky
Draeseke

1. Mahler
2. Sibelius
3. Bruckner
4. Haydn
5. Beethoven
6. Rubbra
7. Holmboe
8. Brahms
9. Shostakovich
10. Ives

Though I wouldnt count Nielsen as one of the 10 greatest symphonists I would mention his 5th as one of the greatest of its kind and he would be a contender if all of his 6 were as staggering as this work - if he had gone further he may have develeoped like Dvorak into a greater symphonuist all round