AN ODE to JOY • SBSO & Saginaw Choral Socity Celebrate 90 Years

A major celebration is poised to happen the evening of Saturday, May 9^th, as the Saginaw Bay Symphony Orchestra and Saginaw Choral Society join forces at The Temple Theatre for a massive joint collaboration marking the 90^th Anniversary of both organizations in a spectacular program titled An Ode to Joy.

Designed to showcase the full choral society joining forces with an expanded orchestra for a landmark performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 -  equally well-known and distinguished as one of the most famous musical compositions of all time - this work is truly unique insofar as it was the first major symphony to incorporate vocal soloists and a chorus.

When it premiered in 1824, its monumental scale, emotional shift from struggle to unity, and pioneering combination of symphonic and choral elements totally redefined the entire genre of classical music.

At the time back in 1936 when the SBSO and Choral Society first formed, within a historical context it is also interesting to note how in July of that year Saginaw was impacted by a record heat wave  when temperatures reached an unprecedented 111 degrees, while 1936 also marked the start of the pivotal General Motors sit-down strike resulting in factory occupations as part of the UAW’s battle with GM, with local plants attempting to shift production to non-union shops in Indiana and other states.

Ironically, the volatility of those times 90-years ago aligns with the structural symmetry of Beethoven’s Symphony #9 insofar as it famously set Friedrich Schiller’s poem "Ode to Joy" in the final movement - its revolutionary combination of a massive orchestra with human voices promoting a profound message of universal brotherhood. Composed while Beethoven was profoundly deaf, it is a testament to human resilience and an anthem of peace, famously adopted by the Council of Europe, and later the European Union, as the Anthem of Europe.

As the final complete symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven, composed between 1822 and 1824, this piece also marks the first example of a major composer scoring vocal parts in a symphony, and is regarded by many critics and musicologists as a masterpiece of Western classical music and one of the greatest and most influential musical works in history. It continues to stand as one of the most frequently performed symphonies in the world; and structurally, it is notably longer and more complex than its predecessors, requiring nearly 70+ minutes to perform, which influenced the development of future musical formats.

Given all these distinguishing qualities, what does SBSO Director & Conductor Fouad Fakhouri feel Beethoven’s 9^th symphony possesses that distinguishes its greatness and makes it such a unique and substantial piece of music?

“It’s clearly a great piece of music, but I’ll tell you what I think about it in a reverse process,” he reflects. “It’s well-known, well-performed, and while people love it for me as I age and look at it now from a different point-of-view, I find it to be an unwieldy and difficult piece to put together coherently, largely because of its’ monumental scope. It’s very long - you have four movements, you have the choir and the soloists waiting for the 4^th Movement before they participate, so you have 45-minutes where it’s just the orchestra performing, and all of this poses its own set of challenges.”

“Beethoven attempts at the end of the piece to bring it together by revisiting ideas from the 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd movements, tying them together in the finale which all makes sense; but as I’m studying it now all I can think about is Beethoven’s progression. When he wrote his 1^st Symphony it was a wonderful work similar to classicists like Mozart or Haydn, then he moved forward to the 2^nd Symphony, and then the 3^rd, and when he did the Eroica is when Beethoven appeared very clearly. With this 4^th Symphony I wonder if he had lived longer and wrote more symphonies with choirs, what would have followed?  What unifies me most about this piece is the idea of going from darkness to light”

“The  trajectory of the entire work starts really softly, dimly, almost like creating the world from scratch with gestures that are very dark in the beginning, all the way to the light when you hear the Ode to Joy,” he continues. “I think that's what unifies it for me. The difficulty with this work is to create that unity and connect that emotional transition with a piece that runs over 65 minutes so the audience leaves feeling it was a unified work, as opposed to waiting for 3 movements to get to the 4th movement, which we love and are familiar with.”

“I think Beethoven clearly wanted to use the Schiller poem in the final movement and was attracted to its message of brotherhood, joy, and fraternity,” reflects Fakhouri. “He wrote a different choral work for piano, orchestra, and choral symphony as he was toying with the idea of using the choir and orchestra along with choral soloists, and this is what I love Beethoven and why I wonder how he would have evolved with any future symphonies had he done more of this work.  He slaved on this composition and was such a calculating composer, which you can tell from looking back to his sketchbooks. He slaved on that motif in the 4^th movement forever, which is true of typically great art where it seems so simple but is really very complicated.”

People also forget that Beethoven was completely deaf when he created this masterpiece, which is another challenge to marvel at. “I’m glad you bring this up,” notes Fakhouri, “because while you cannot tell he was going deaf towards the end of his life because everything sounds harmonically perfect, the ranges of the voices and especially the soloists at the end are almost in the range of screaming because they are written so high that it’s difficult to keep them under control.  It’s very exciting but quite taxing for the singers.”

For this performance Maestro Fakhouri will also be boosting the orchestra with additional woodwinds, an additional contra-bassoon, an additional piccolo, and an increased string section. “I’m trying to go for more strings because that’s what will give more volume to the sound, so in terms of participants we should have about 67 musicians or so in the orchestra and a choir of about 80 people, along with the 4 soloists.”

“This is such a big piece of music and such a popular piece that we can’t perform every day because of all the resources it takes to pull it together, so I would encourage people to come and enjoy this unique celebration.”

The SBSO’s 90^th • An Ode to Joy happens on Saturday, May 9^th at 7:30 PM at Saginaw’s Temple Theatre. Tickets start at $26.00 and can be purchased by visiting or calling the Temple Theatre Box office at 989.754.7469 or visiting TempleTheatre.com.