The Philadelphia Orchestra
This event has been rescheduled from January 11, 2022. Tickets for the original date will still be honored.
Performers
The Philadelphia Orchestra
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Music Director and Conductor
Angel Blue, Soprano
Rihab Chaieb, Mezzo-Soprano
Matthew Polenzani, Tenor
Ryan Speedo Green, Bass-Baritone
Philadelphia Symphonic Choir
Joe Miller, Director
Program
BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 1
GABRIELA LENA FRANK Pachamama Meets an Ode (World Premiere)
BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 9
Event Duration
The printed program will last approximately two hours, including one 20-minute intermission.Listen to Selected Works
At a Glance
The Philadelphia Orchestra concludes its cycle of Beethoven’s nine symphonies with his first and last. Perhaps intimidated by the stature and historic innovations of his teacher Joseph Haydn—the “Father of the Symphony”—Beethoven held off premiering his own first until 1800, at age 29. (Mozart wrote his first at age eight and Schubert at 16.) Its success began to change the history of the genre and culminated in his monumental Ninth a quarter-century later.
By the end of his career, Beethoven was widely regarded as the greatest living composer. He had not composed a symphony in nearly a decade when he produced the extraordinary—and, for some, baffling—Ninth Symphony. Beethoven sets Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” a poem with a powerful Enlightenment message that has continued to resonate and inspire for nearly two centuries.
Between these symphonies we hear a work inspired by them. The Philadelphia Orchestra’s composer-in-residence, Gabriela Lena Frank, draws inspiration from Beethoven, his world, and her Peruvian cultural heritage to ask profound questions and to address issues of climate change. The choral-orchestral work Pachamama Meets an Ode imagines an encounter between Beethoven and an indigenous painter plying his trade in a Spanish-style church constructed on the remains of an Inca temple.