Beethoven’s 9th closes out Wichita Symphony Orchestra’s 80th season
Arguably the classical icon’s second-best-known work, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony will close out the 80th season for the Wichita Symphony Orchestra next weekend.
“We wanted to do something very celebratory for the end of the 80th season to kind of cap it off,” conductor and music director Daniel Hege said, “and Beethoven’s Ninth is a much more than appropriate, and a very exciting choice.”
Particularly with the symphony’s vocal finale, “Ode to Joy,” the melody is inescapable, from “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee” in the church hymnal to the soundtrack of scenes from “Die Hard.”
Symphonies in Minnesota and Washington state perform the Ninth every season, Hege said, and in Japan an annual festival is based on the work.
“It’s in many ways kind of like the ‘Messiah,’” he said of the Handel oratorio. “People just want to hear that over and over again. It has such a powerful message as far as joy and unity and brotherhood and sisterhood. But I think it’s something important that we need to hear today and is a perennial message, really.”
Hege said Beethoven had been entranced with Frederich Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy” in the composer’s early 20s in 1793.
After a commission from the Philharmonic Society of London decades later, he added the melody that he had been sketching for about 25 years.
“It’s something that sounds so simple and that is so universal everyone knows this melody, it’s an iconic melody,” Hege said. “To think that it had been percolating in his mind for all of these years and then found the perfect marriage of that melody with that poem. This whole piece was basically gestating in him for all this time.”
By the time Beethoven had written the Ninth, Hege said, the composer was completely deaf.
“Going over these obstacles and then brimming over with optimism about this very radical idea, which I think he believed in that music can unite people. Music can bring people together and it can civilize us,” Hege said. “And I think that’s really what his great message was and that we should unite.”
Featured soloists in the concert, which also includes the Wichita Symphony Chorus, are Wichita State voice faculty Cristina Castaldi (soprano), Hilary Taylor (mezzo-soprano), Alan Held (bass) and tenor Cole McIlquham, resident artist at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia.
The Ninth is paired with “Umoja,” by modern composer Valerie Coleman, who initially gained fame as a flutist, Hege said.
“It was really during COVID that I got to know her name,” he said. “She was writing some music for the Philadelphia Orchestra. When I was researching on YouTube, they were performing some of her works. One of them was ‘Seven O’clock Shout,’ specifically about COVID and about all the rescue workers.”
The Wichita Symphony performed that piece in January 2022.
Hege said he liked the message of “Umoja,” Swahili for unity, as a companion to “Ode to Joy.”
“And it also joins in with the same message of unity,” he said. “I felt like it was good to go across cultures to really show unity. And of course, Beethoven did mean it as a universal message.”
WICHITA SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 12
Where: Century II concert hall
Tickets: $10-$85, from wichitasymphony.org, the symphony box office or at 316-267-7658