The SSO is doing an old crowd pleaser, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, this week (again!). So the choir’s up for four performances: one tonight (Wednesday) and then on Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. At least we all know it from memory and all houses will be full, so there should be a great buzz. But it’s still physically quite a big sing.
Hope it goes well. Not to piss in your pot, but I much prefer the earlier movements of the 9th to the final one where the chorus joins in! Still, you get the best seat in the house…4 times.
You know it from memory? I’m impressed.
Good luck! As my choir director is fond of pointing out, either Beethovern knew nothing about the human voice or he just didn’t care.
What part do you sing?
What’s your favorite part of the piece? I love the men’s “drinking chorus” (which, as an alto, I never get to sing) and the “Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen?” Sometimes it’s all I can do to keep from actually falling to my knees. I also love the counter melody the woodwinds play.
Damn, I’m jealous. I never get tired of singing the 9th. If there’s a choral heaven, we’ll get to sing this with a choir of thousands of voices; Beethoven will be conducting – and he’ll be able to hear.
Once or twice is OK. Four times gets rather boring.
There’s not really all that much to learn. We had to do it from memory a while ago when we did some performances where the choir and soloists were “disguised” as audience members and we all just leapt up at the end and started singing.
I just don’t think he cared. But it’s the sopranos who get the worst of it.
First tenor
I rather like the fugue. The tenors get an interesting syncopated part.
My last performance with a chorus was the Ninth, with the Fort Worth Symphony (also a first tenor). Wonderful experience.
have fun with it, The timpani part for the 9th is a monster!!
im currently getting it ready for an upcomming audition!
Good Luck!
My alto section usually sits behind the timpanist. It’s quite a show during the Ninth.
Pardon the hijack and pardon the ignorance (I know nothing about percussion), but what distinguishes a great timpanist from a so-so? Do you have perfect pitch? What makes the Ninth so difficult for the timpanist?
I forget what piece it was, but there was a long section where the timpanist basically struck the same soft note once every couple of measures. This went on for awhile, then suddenly he got all frantic, grabbed a pencil and furiously scrawled something in his score. I always wondered what it was: Remember to pick up milk on the way home? Only 100 more measures of this to go? Or possibly some brilliant point of musicality comprehensible only to the most accomplished performer?
I went to my university’s performance of the 9th, and they had the chorus stand on risers the entire time. One person fell off the top, which they really should have kind of anticipated, making them wait all that time.
Good luck, Cunctator! I sang in the bass section when my choir performed Beethoven’s 9th with the El Paso Symphony about 10 years ago. I loved every note of it.
I was standing in the foyer after one performance, clutching my score under my arm, when my dentist (who was a member of the symphony guild) ran up to me to present his compliments. “That was wonderful!” he said. “I could even hear you.”
“You know, Dr. Smith,” I replied with a bit of a wry grin, “if you could distinguish my voice over 150 others, not to mention the orchestra…well, it’s probably not a good thing.”
He just smiled…
BTW, I loved the idea of planting members of the chorus in amongst the audience. Really cool. We performed the Verdi Requiem a few years back, and the conductor placed the brass soloists for the opening of the Tuba mirum section up in the highest balconies. It really did sound as if the trumpet was ringing forth from the heavens.
Seid umschlungen, Millionen! The 9th never gets old. Have a wonderful time, and remember to pity the sopranos with their torture of bar after bar of super duper high As and Bs.
My wife’s a coloratura soprano. She sang it once.
Just once. That man, he sure hated sopranos. She wrecked her voice for quite a while afterwards, and has not sung it since.
Have fun with it, even if it does get a bit boring. Hey, at least you’re performing !!
Cartooniverse
Well, he was deaf when he wrote the 9th, including Choral parts. Maybe he just forgot what people could do easily. I’ll have to go listen to Fidelius and Missa Solemnis and see if they are difficult for the singers.
I sang it with the (amateur/community) Stanford Symphonic Choir, and it was Just. Plain. Awesome.
And we memorized it, which made it a lot more fun (once it was memorized), because we could just pay attention to the conductor and nothing else.
There are very few pieces of Great Art (in any medium) that are as immediately accessible as the 9th, while still being Great.
As we used to say… “Freude Schoene Gotterfunken” translates as “Brothers and sisters got da funk” 
One down, three to go. Last night’s performance was great and the audience went wild at the end. There’s nothing like the Ninth to get them on their feet.
And we get tonight off!
I’ll post the review when it appears.
It was great fun, but it also scared the living daylights out of the people who were (unknowingly) sitting next to choristers.
The review for Wednesday night’s performance is in this morning’s (Friday’s) paper. It’s less favourable than I’d have expected from the performance. The program included both Beethoven’s First and Ninth symphonies.
Following the final performance, the members of my choir were given T-shirts that said, “I survived the Missa Solemnis.”
Cunctator, Reviewers always have to find some fault – it supposedly shows that they are excruciating knowledgeable about the music and thus qualified for their job.