A nearly hour-long Ninth Symphony with chorus and large orchestra: who wouldn’t think of Beethoven? But, “instead of praising joy, that beautiful spark of the gods” — to quote the Schiller line Beethoven sets in his Ninth — Henze said that in his Sinfonia N. 9 he evokes “a world of horror and persecution that continues to cast its shadow.” The work is based on Anna Seghers’s great anti-fascist novel The Seventh Cross: seven prisoners escape from a concentration camp in Nazi Germany, and only one of them manages to reach freedom. With gripping intensity and deep empathy, Henze traces the fugitives’ terror and the brutality of their pursuers — “an apotheosis of the terrible and the painful,” and at the same time “an expression of the greatest reverence for the people who resisted during the era of Nazi-fascist terror.” With Henze’s harrowing confession in sound, the Konzerthausorchester Berlin makes its Lucerne Festival debut.
