Beethoven’s Ninth protagonist of the Christmas concert at the RAI Auditorium in Turin
Directed by maestro Fabio Luisi, scheduled for Friday 23 December
The most famous of Ludwig van Beethoven’s symphonies, the Ninth, overall summa of those ideals of humanity and brotherhood which are the ideological premise of all the composer’s work, is the protagonist of the Christmas Concert of the RAI National Symphony Orchestra, scheduled Friday 23 December at 8.30 pm at the RAI Auditorium. On the podium the honorary director of the RAI company Fabio Luisi, who holds prestigious positions at the Danish Radio Orchestra, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo. Luisi is back from the success of the OSN RAI Season Opening Concert, in which he conducted another grandiose choral symphonic page such as Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony. Next to him the Chorus of the Teatro Regio in Turin will be directed by Maestro Andrea Secchi. The voices of soprano Uliana Alexyuk, contralto Valentina Stadler, tenor Nicky Spence and bass Tómas Tómasson will be the protagonists.
Symphony N.9 in D minor op. 125 for Beethoven’s Choir and Orchestra only saw the light in 1824, eleven years after completing the Seventh and Eighth Symphony.
The Ninth Symphony took shape very slowly throughout Beethoven’s life and can be traced back to the period in which the composer frequented the intellectual elites of Bonn, entering into friendly relations with the wealthy Von Breuning family, where he met the poet and Greek scholar Eulogius Schneider, enthusiastic supporter of the ideals of the French Revolution. At the University of Bonn, Beethoven attended Fischenic’s Philosophy courses, which introduced him to Schiller’s work and that ode “An die Freude” written in 1785 and published in 1786, which would become a symbol of the ideals of young people Germans.
Beethoven had imagined setting this poem to music, but the project initially did not go through due to the composer’s sudden departure for Vienna and the censorship that had hit Schiller’s works, banned in Vienna as immoral and dangerous writings. In the early years of the nineteenth century Beethoven already had in mind to compose a large symphonic-choral fresco, but only in the spring of 1823 did he rework all the notes assembled up to then in an organic way, the result of a long maturation, composing the first and second movement and completing, in October, the Adagio.
In February 1824 the insertion of the Ode Schilleriana was entrusted to solo voices and choir and the score was completed. Preparations began for the first performance of the Ninth Symphony, which took place in Vienna on May 7, 1824 at the Karntnertortheatre. This concert remained memorable and the Ninth Symphony was conducted, together with the three pieces of the Missa Solemnis, by the composer himself, even if, given his health conditions, the concertation was entrusted to the Maestro Stabile of that time.
The Ninth Symphony immediately appeared as a revolutionary masterpiece not only for the presence of the voices and the choir, but because it undermined the very concept of the Symphony, giving life to a grandiose sound architecture in which other musical genres also coexisted, such as the operatic style , military music, the “Turkish” exoticisms and the polyphonic writing typical of sacred music, capable of integrating into a unitary organism, rich in rhythmic subtleties and characterized by an inexhaustible energy in the assemblage of musical figures.
The concert on Friday 23 December was sold out and the evening is being broadcast by RAI Cultura on RAI 5 at 9.15pm. It will also be broadcast live on Radio 3 and live streaming on RAI Play. The revival of the season of the RAI Symphony Orchestra in the new year will be entrusted to Mendelssohn’s Symphonies No. 1 and No. 3, scheduled for Wednesday 11 and Thursday 12 January; the Symphony N.2 Lobgesang, in a single evening on Monday 16 January and the Symphony N.4 and N.5 (La Riforma) on Thursday 19 and Friday 20 January.
Mara Martellotta