Beethoven's 9th Symphony to be presented Saturday

On Saturday, April 27, Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, op. 125, will be presented in Bailey Hall at 8 p.m. by the combined forces of the Cornell Symphony Orchestra and the Cornell Chorus and Glee Club and will be conducted by John Hsu, the Old Dominion Foundation Professor of Music at Cornell. The concert is free and open to the public.

John Hsu will conduct Saturday night's performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 by the Cornell Symphony Orchestra and the Cornell University Chorus and Glee Club in Bailey Hall. University Photography

The soloists for the work include soprano Judith Kellock, associate professor of music, with three guests: mezzo-soprano Kelly Samarzea, of the Ithaca College School of Music faculty, tenor Noel Velasco, and baritone Robert Honeysucker, who sang the Brahms Requiem at Cornell in February 1996.

James Webster, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Music at Cornell, says that "the three instrumental movements, notwithstanding their gigantic scale and their novel ideas and musical procedures, are generically straightforward, both intrinsically and in their ordered succession: a relentlessly tragic opening movement in sonata form; a demonic-playful scherzo contrasting with a childlike trio in the major; a blissful, almost otherworldly adagio. ... The finale, by contrast, was controversial throughout the 19th century, when the introduction of text and voices into a symphony was felt to be a violation of the spirit of 'absolute music.'" The text of this final movement is from Friedrich Schiller's ode An die Freude ("Ode to Joy"), first published in 1785.

Webster says that while "the Utopian strain in Beethoven's Ninth has always been obvious, ... many authorities of a postmodernist persuasion, even today, deny its claims to resolution and transcendence. ... But the experience of hearing Beethoven's music confounds the skeptics. It is not only that human voices speak to us, but that their entry is long delayed and elaborately prepared by difficult and obscure passages, such that it becomes an 'event,' of unusual significance."

Conductor Hsu has been on the Cornell music faculty since 1955. He is the founder and conductor of the Apollo Ensemble (a period instrument chamber orchestra) and a renowned virtuoso player of the viola da gamba and baryton. As both a conductor and an instrumentalist, he has been awarded grants by The Fund for U.S. Artists at International Festivals and Exhibitions, a public/private partnership of the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Information Agency, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts. He has performed throughout North America and Europe and has made award-winning recordings, including a CD of Haydn Baryton Trios (with violist David Miller and cellist Fortunato Arico) and Symphonies for the Esterhazy Court by Joseph Haydn (with the Apollo Ensemble). In recognition of his edition of the complete instrumental works of Marin Marais (1656-1728), the most important composer of music for the viola da gamba, and for his performances and recordings of French Baroque music for the viola da gamba, the French government conferred on him the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in May of 2000.