Beethoven 9: Joy to the World

Stella Sung: Oceana
Clara Schumann: Piano Concerto
Beethoven: Symphony No. 9, “Ode to Joy”

SARA DAVIS BUECHNER piano
NEAL GITTLEMAN conductor
DAYTON PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA

Olive W. Kettering Memorial Concert

Stella Sung’s Oceana is a multimedia tribute to life in the oceans—a soundscape alive with the calls of humpback whales, dolphins, and porpoises, but also frightening—showing humankind’s incursion on a fragile ecology. Clara Schumann, an outstanding-but-overlooked composer of the Romantic Era, was also hailed as a virtuoso pianist. Her youthful Piano Concerto is making its DPO debut, performed by returning soloist Sara Davis Buechner. The monumental Ninth embodies the ideals we associate with Beethoven, expressed majestically and powerfully and epitomized in Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” the text set in the final movement. It celebrates a world united in brotherhood and friendship, while the music’s euphoric harmonies enfold us in a sublime embrace.