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Tadaaki Otaka Leads Tokyo Philharmonic To Perform Beethoven Symphony No.9

Tadaaki Otaka to conduct Sym 9 w Tokyo Philharmonic. Music Press Asia

Scheduled for performance on Christmas day (Sunday, 25th Dec at 3 P.M.), Tadaaki Otaka will lead Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra to perform a special concert presented by Rakutan Card. The program is to perform Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 (Choral) at the Bunkamura Orchard Hall.

Tadaaki Otaka has served as conductor of the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra and became conductor laureate since 1991. He studied composition, theory, and French horn, at the Toho Gakuen School of Music, and was subsequently a conducting student of Hideo Saito.

Artists performing with the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra will include Miho Sakoda (soprano), Ikuko Nakajima (alto), Tetsutaro Shimizu (tenor), Hayato Kamie (baritone) and accompanied by the New National Theatre Chorus.

The Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, is a choral symphony, the final complete symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven. It was first performed in Vienna on 7 May 1824. The symphony is regarded by many critics and musicologists as Beethoven’s greatest work and stands as one of the most frequently performed symphonies in the world.

“There’s something astonishing about a deaf composer choosing to open a symphony with music that reveals, like no other music before it, the very essence of sound emerging from silence,” writes CSOA scholar-in-residence and program annotator Phillip Huscher.

“The famous pianissimo opening — sixteen measures with no secure sense of key or rhythm — does not so much depict the journey from darkness to light, or from chaos to order, as the birth of sound itself or the creation of a musical idea. It is as if the challenges of Beethoven’s daily existence — the struggle to compose music, his difficulty in communicating, the frustration of remembering what it was like to hear — have been made real in a single page of music,” he added.

In 2001, Beethoven’s original, hand-written manuscript of the score, held by the Berlin State Library, was added to the Memory of the World Programme Heritage list established by the United Nations, becoming the first musical score so designated.

All tickets have already sold out. For more information, visit TPO’s official website here.

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