SLSO Beethoven 9th Symphony Saturday on the Web
This Saturday Night, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra's sold-out concert of Beethoven's 9th Symphony will be broadcast live on KFUO Classic 99. If you're not in listening range, but have an internet connection that permits streaming audio, you can listen LIVE to the concert by going to http://www.classic99.com/ and clicking on the green square under the words ‘Listen Live’ in the upper left hand corner of the homepage. The performance begins at 8:00 p.m. Central Time, but there may be some pre-concert talk on the schedule before 8.
The program notes are always superb at Powell Symphony Hall. You can read them, too, on the SLSO web site.
Beethoven was at the height of his powers when he composed this breakthrough piece of music. There had never before been a choral movement in a symphony, never a passage of "recitative" for the orchestral basses, and never the sound of cymbals and triangle. I remember when I used to listen to a recording of this final movement during breakfast in my senior year in high school. I was always charmed by the sound of what I took to be a little town band, with its cymbal and triangle, as they tooted away on the little tune that would later turn out to be a majestic melody for Schiller's "Ode to Joy."
I feel so privileged to be a part of the symphony chorus! I always feel as if I have the best seat in the house because I'm right there with all the other musicians and I can see Maestro David Robertson's expressions as he shapes the performance.
Someone wrote once that "great music is about great ideas." I don't agree with that as it stands. I think the greatness of music is in the exceptional deployment of musical ideas. A composer of Beethoven's intelligence works at the atomic level; he fashions ideas from atoms...a couple of notes or intervals, or a few notes with a distinctive rhythm. Then he puts those atoms together in different contexts, and you hardly realize the unity of the mind behind the whole work.
The same idea of composing several related things from a single theme is present in The Music Man by Meredith Wilson. If you slow down "Seventy Six Trombones" and give it a different background and different lyrics, you have "Goodnight, My Someone." It's not the same idea as symphonic writing, but it has the same principle of unity.
Beethoven did not invent the technique of building grand designs from atomic ideas; and the technique did not come easily to him His notebooks show how much he labored with those atoms to make their embodiment sound "just right." We think of him as a man of weighty ideas. We should ponder his exquisite sense of lightness as well. His sense of balance seems flawless. He knew when to continue polishing an idea and just when to stop. He takes us to the breathtaking brink of breakdown and holds us harmless, and we are changed people when we open ourselves to his thought.
--Michael Bouman
