Sunday afternoon's Red Cross benefit performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has been moved from the Boston Garden to Symphony Hall. A joint effort of the Harvard Glee Club, Radcliffe Choral Society, Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Mettropolitan Opera stars Eleanor Steeber, Kirsten Thorborg, Kurt Baum, and Norman Cordon, this performance, the first of its kind of this work since 1943, is estimated from advance sales to come to about 15,000.
Testament of Freedom
The Orchestra will also accompany the Glee Club in singing the Testament of Freedom by Randall Thompson '20. The words of this music were written by Thomas Jefferson and were first sung by the University of Virginia in 1943 on the two hundredth anniversary of Jefferson's birth, but this is the first time it has ever been played by an orchestra.
For the final Boston Symphony Concert in New York of the season, the Glee Club will repeat its performance of the Testament of Freedom in Carnegie Hall. At all three performances of this work, Koussevitzky will also play Shostakovitch's Eighth Symphony, introduced into this country a year ago last summer, the second of a trio of symphonies depicting Russia at war.
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