Adams’s piece is not about transmigration so much as chaos and pathos and pain. Taped city sounds give way to the intonation of the word “missing’’ and phrases from missing-persons posters and a recitation of names; piano and violins play a quarter-tone sharp, as if the dead of 9/11 were now in a different dimension. A trumpet line alludes unmistakably to Charles Ives’s “The Unanswered Question’’; Adams doesn’t try to answer it. Crammed into every nook and cranny of the Sanders Theatre stage, the Harvard Glee Club, Radcliffe Choral Society, and Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, along with the Boston Children’s Chorus in the balcony, joined conductor Andrew Clark (Harvard director of choral activities) and the orchestra in a performance that was as lucid and reverent as you could ask for.
Given the massive forces (some 100 instrumentalists and 150 singers), the Beethoven, under HRO music director Federico Cortese, had remarkable pace and point. The first two movements sounded like an angry response to 9/11; amid the assured assault of the strings, a touch of Viennese subjunctive wouldn’t have been amiss. But the songful open adagio section of the third movement brought consolation, and when, a minute later, the second violins and violas broke into the andante theme, it was not the usual glimmer of hope but an outburst of transcendent joy. Anchored by the vocal quartet of Diana Jacklin, Joanna Porackova, Brian Landry, and James Kleyla (the men especially impressive), the fourth movement moved like a speeding bullet, the cellos powerful in dismissing suggestions from the first three movements and holding out for the brotherhood theme, the soloists fervent, the choruses exemplary in their intensity and enunciation. When it’s too measured, the ending of the Ninth can be an anticlimax; this one was an exuberant juggernaut. Terrorist hate never had a chance.
Jeffrey Gantz can be reached at jeffreymgantz@gmail.com.
