🎶✨ Ludwig van Beethoven – Symphony No. 9 ("Ode to Joy") London Symphony Orchestra & Choir 🎵 Sir Antonio Pappano – conductor 🪄 • In 1822, London's Royal Philharmonic Society paid Beethoven fifty pounds to write a symphony. It was meant to premiere in London. Beethoven accepted, fell ill, missed the deadline, and wrote on the first page of the manuscript that the work was for the London society. But he premiered the Ninth in Vienna, on May 7, 1824, before London had received a single page. The score only arrived six months later. The British premiere took place on March 21, 1825, without Beethoven, who never set foot on English soil. • The Ninth lasts more than an hour, and the choir only enters in the last of the four movements. Before it, the orchestra moves through a storm in D minor, then a dance in cut time, and finally the slowest adagio Beethoven ever wrote. When the choir finally arrives, at the very moment captured in this video, it comes as the destination of that entire path. What sounds like a hymn got there only after every single note that came before. • The conductor is Sir Antonio Pappano, an Anglo-Italian maestro born in 1959. He was music director of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden for twenty-two years, the longest tenure in the house's history. In September 2024 he became Chief Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, succeeding Simon Rattle. This concert carries special significance: it marks exactly 200 years since the British premiere of the Ninth, in March 1825. In 1825, the choir sang Schiller in Italian. In 2025, it is an Italian who conducts the work in London. • 👉 Follow for the best of classical music daily on your feed. • • • #beethoven #choir #choral #classicalmusic - @reels.classics