Karita Mattila - Beethoven - Symphony No.9 In D Minor, Op.125 - "Choral" (2000) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

A year after Beethoven’s death in 1827, a historic concert series began in Paris featuring all of his symphonies, including the local premiere of Symphony No. 3 (the “Eroica”) at the first concert and of No.9 at the last. The canonization of the nine symphonies was already under way, and from that time on this body of music has been revered as the composer’s greatest legacy and installed as a special heritage of European or Western culture. The whole symphonic repertory has been built around the Beethoven symphonies. They are drawn upon for endless musical projects, festivals and recordings, books, articles and program notes.
With the untroubled Symphony No. 8, written in 1812, Beethoven made his symbolic farewells to the master-genre that defines what we now call his “heroic” decade. After that he lived through some difficult and lean years, due to personal crises that have been the subject of many books and even films. There must also have been an artistic crisis that we know less about. Something other than the concept of heroism was necessary to get him moving again. That something can never be defined, of course. But one important strand contributing to it emerged from a commission that came to him in 1819, when his pupil and patron the Archduke Rudolph of Austria was to be installed as Archbishop of Olmütz and a high Mass was required. This project took Beethoven four years to complete and confronted him with problems of metaphysics and belief that he had not dealt with before.
Missa Solemnis op.123, as twin professions of faith, one sacred and one secular. In this situation it was necessary to make the symphonic trajectory entirely clear, at least at the end: so words were introduced with singers to utter them. Schiller’s classic text (dating from 1785) is a lengthy drinking song with insistent religious refrains. God is the fount of human joy, and joy is proof that a loving Father – Schiller also calls him “the Unknown” – must dwell above the stars, as Kant taught. (Under glass on Beethoven’s desk: “‘The moral law within us, the starry heavens above us’ – Kant!!!”) Of all the many joys of mankind eulogized in the Ode, the highest is religious ecstasy.

TRACKLIST

1. Berliner Philharmoniker - 1. Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso (Live)
2. Berliner Philharmoniker - 2. Molto vivace (Live)
3. Berliner Philharmoniker - 3. Adagio molto e cantabile (Live)
4. Berliner Philharmoniker - 4. Presto - Allegro assai (Live)
5. Karita Mattila - 4. Presto - "O Freunde nicht diese Töne" - (Live)



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