“The Philadelphia Orchestra’s cycle of Beethoven symphonies was supposed to come to Carnegie Hall in spring 2020. It should go without saying: It didn’t,” writes Joshua Barone in Tuesday’s (2/22) New York Times. “Only on Monday did the cycle reach its conclusion, with the Philadelphians’ music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, at the podium for the First Symphony and the mighty Ninth, alongside a world premiere inspired by it, Gabriela Lena Frank’s ‘Pachamama Meets an Ode.’ … Her new work is a fantastical encounter between Beethoven and a contemporaneous Cusco School painter, tracing the climate crisis of today to the exploitation of natural resources and the global expansion of European powers in Beethoven’s time…. Using the same orchestration as Beethoven’s Ninth, minus its four vocal soloists, ‘Pachamama’ is big…. Distinct textures do break the waves of sound: chromatic chattering in the strings, and dissonant humming in the choir…. The words are set straightforwardly, transformed only in the end to elongate the questions ‘What of odes?’ and ‘What of joy?’ Then a horn lingers indefinitely, a looming punctuation mark…. In the fermata rest of the Ninth’s final bar, Frank’s horn still resonated in the mind, still asking: What of odes? What of joy?”
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