Beethoven’s final completed symphony is widely considered his best, and its rule-breaking fourth movement that included a chorus has endured in popular culture. The work is a regular in films and television scores and among symphonies and orchestras worldwide — including Albany Symphony, which is bringing back the beloved Ninth with Albany Pro Musica on Saturday and Sunday.
This will not be the first time the two organizations collaborated on Beethoven’s Ninth, last performing it in 2017, nor is it the first time David Alan Miller, Albany Symphony’s music director, has conducted it. Because of its legacy and lasting popularity, Miller tries to program it every five to seven years.
“What’s so wonderful about revisiting masterworks of this scope and caliber is that every time you start working on it again, you discover all sorts of things and say to yourself, ‘Why didn’t I see that before?’” Miller said.
This time, Miller’s surprise discovery was that Beethoven considered replacing the chorale section of the fourth movement, adapted from “Ode to Joy,” a poem by Friedrich Schiller, with something purely instrumental following its premiere. That section is what made the symphony so innovative for the time, and it’s what has largely contributed to its popularity, said Miller and Jose David Flores-Caraballo, Albany Pro Musica’s artistic director.
Part of that is because of the simplicity of “Ode to Joy,” which Beethoven worked hard to achieve, Miller said, almost as if he was writing a folk song. The iconic motif is composed of just five notes, Flores-Caraballo said.
“You have the combination of a very simple motif and then you have a genius composer who has brought the most complex symphony,” Flores-Caraballo said. “How often do people go to a concert, and they go home and they cannot remember a melody…
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