On Wednesday, December 31, audiences are invited to join Seattle Symphony for a New Year’s Eve celebration, including a performance by Seattle Symphony, an after-party with dessert, champagne toast and dancing to the music of Emerald City Throwdown, plus a countdown to 2009.
Maestro Gerard Schwarz will lead the Orchestra in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony featuring esteemed vocalists and the Seattle Symphony Chorale. Works by Ginastera, Sousa and Strauss, Sr., will also be performed. Special this year, the Seattle Seahawks Blue Thunder drumline will perform solo selections as well as with the Orchestra. Tickets for the 9 p.m. concert start at $40 and include the post-concert celebration with champagne, dessert and dancing.
Concert-goers also have the opportunity to enjoy a pre-concert dinner, complete with a two-course meal prepared by the award-winning chefs of Wolfgang Puck for an additional cost of $69 per person. Doors open to dinner patrons at 6:45 p.m. and dinner begins promptly at 7:15 p.m.
Program
Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, “Choral,” is among the most-loved symphonic compositions of all time. By turns dramatic and ardently felt, the first three movements form a magnificent introduction to the famed choral finale drawn from Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.”
Argentine-born composer Alberto Ginastera combined indigenous musical motifs from his homeland with advanced European-based, 20th-century techniques. Best remembered for his astonishingly vital ballet, Estancia (“Ranch”), composed in 1941 for the American Ballet Caravan, the composer extracted four movements from the work entitled “Dances from the Ballet, Estancia,” which have become concert mainstays over the past half-century.
John Philip Sousa’s single most famous piece is undoubtedly the much-loved march, The Stars and Stripes Forever. In his autobiography, Marching Along, Sousa says that he composed the march on Christmas Day in 1896 while on a ferry to Europe; lacking writing paper, he kept the music in his head until landfall. The dazzling piccolo solo in the march’s trio all but assured continued popularity. So widespread has been the appeal of this bracing patriotic ditty that it serves de facto as our National March.
Johann Strauss, Sr., composed the Radetzky March in honor of the Austrian Field Marshall, Joseph Radetzky von Radetz, which may explain its immediate popularity among soldiers. Keen ears will no doubt recognize the theme’s similarity to the final part of Rossini’s magnificent overture to William Tell. The March’s popularity grew far beyond the garrison though, and ultimately became a fixture of Viennese New Year tradition. It generally is the final piece played at the Vienna New Year Concert, invariably following his son’s Beautiful Blue Danube Waltz. -- www.seattlesymphony.org
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