Beethoven No. 9 with the Kalamazoo Philharmonia

Perhaps no single work has had a bigger impact on the imagination of generations of musicians than the heaven-storming Ninth Symphony of Beethoven. In his late style, boundaries no longer mattered to the composer; hence his bold decision to add singers and text to a genre that, by definition, had been purely instrumental. The Enlightenment-era text of Schiller – the beloved Ode to Joy, a paean to the universal kinship of all humankind – resonates...