October 12, 2023 By Roy Harris
The Atlantic Symphony Orchestra features Beethoven’s most famous work, his Fifth Symphony, Saturday, Oct. 21 at 7:30 p.m., in its season opener at the Thayer Center for the Arts in Braintree. But it’s a performance with a difference for the ensemble that started its life in the mid-1940s as the Hingham Civic Orchestra.
The concert by the orchestra, known as the Atlantic Symphony for 26 years now, marks an ambitious and exceedingly rare effort to perform the entire nine-symphony Beethoven cycle. The plan—which long-time ASO maestro Jin Kim has dubbed The Beethoven 1-9 Project—is greatly exciting the area’s classical music lovers.
“Beethoven symphonies have always been our audience’s favorites, and we are looking forward to spotlighting these masterworks before your eyes—plus a few extra Beethoven pieces for good measure,” says Kim.
Indeed, opening night will also feature the master’s beautiful Coriolan Overture on a program that begins with Borodin’s glorious “In the Steppes of Central Asia.” Also on the program: Liszt’s Piano Concerto No.1, performed by Xiaopei Xu, a pianist familiar to ASO audiences. She was featured in the orchestra’s “Broadway and Beyond” concert last August at Hingham’s Glastonbury Abbey.
The beautiful and comfortable Thayer concert hall is at 745 Washington St. just off the Braintree exit from Route 3, and easily accessible from Hingham. Tickets for the ASO’s opening night may be purchased online at this site. https://atlanticsymphony.org/events-tickets/upcoming-events/#1677161667360-d55cffb6-e16d
For the second performance of the new season, on Jan. 27, Kim has chosen Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 to anchor the ASO’s Masterworks After Hours program. That 7:30 p.m. concert is also at Thayer’s Center for the Arts. (In between Thayer’s ASO opening night, and the Jan. 27 Thayer concert, the orchestra will present its Joyful Noise! program on Dec. 9, also at Thayer.)
Then, next March 9 at Thayer, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 is featured, on a program that also contains Mozart’s Divertimento in D and Tchaikovsky’s Variation of a Rococo Theme.
Beethoven Symphonies No. 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8 will be inserted into concerts during the next two ASO seasons, according to Kim, with the 9th—the great Choral Symphony—fittingly marking the end of the Atlantic’s symphony cycle, as it was also for the composer’s.
The conductor, hoping to prepare audiences for this unusual look at the nine-symphony cycle, will be “doing things a little differently when I begin discussing the symphonies,” he says. “There’ll be a bit of an onstage lecture about how you can see some of the musical DNA in these works.” And there will be comparisons to the works of other composers, he adds, noting that, for example, Johannes Brahms took 40 years to write his first symphony, while Beethoven was in his early 20s when No. 1 premiered.
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Roy Harris is a semi-retired journalist living in World’s End area of Hingham. He is a former board member of the Atlantic Symphony Orchestra.