Message from the Artistic Director
(From the program booklet)

Dear Friends,

On October 14, 2005 a week after the cataclysmic earthquake in South Asia, I wrote the words, “THE NINTH FOR SOUTH ASIA” on a piece of paper. In the three months since, those words have been received by so many people around the world from every walk of life, in the spirit of generosity, universal fraternity and genuine caring for our suffering fellow human beings in Pakistan and India as a result of this tragedy.

Beethoven’s magnificent symphony is a testament of the grandeur and radiant simplicity of our human condition. The first movement is a musical creation story, full of tragic irony worthy of the world’s great religions. The second movement fondly declares its affection for human simplicity, innocence and the simple pleasures of life. In the third movement we are taken to the depths of our emotional essence and given a mirror on which to linger. The vastness of the last movement is Beethoven’s canvas on which he lays out his manifesto for the future of the humankind. Schiller’s Ode to Joy -- a veritable declaration of
Joy of every kind, physical, emotional, sensory, and spiritual, as a FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHT -- is the template. Even the lowly invertebrate worm is given a share in the bounty. In other words,  a declaration of nothing less than our obligation as a species to the stewardship of all life on this Earth.

In the heart of the Ode to Joy , Beethoven presents the tune as a German drinking song  of the time, a single reveler supported by a group of his fellows. He embellishes the texture with music of the Turkish military tradition complete with clashing scimitars. Musically, this gesture amounts literally to a call to render swords into ploughshares while bringing the outsider, the immigrant, the “dangerous other” into the space of one’s most  intimate hospitality. This is ultimately not the utterance of an individual. Beethoven’s voice becomes the statement of a civilization, acknowledging that the principle of inclusive embrace is always larger and more potent than the principle of fearful exclusion. Music and art are the blessed vehicles of this message. They have been for centuries and they will continue to be as long as there are human beings on this planet or anywhere else.

This concert was not just produced to alleviate the suffering of the multitudes stricken by this tragedy, but also to bear witness to what Leonard Bernstein called “our boastfully held little blue pilot light of humanity” – our capacity to love universally and in every single aspect of our life and all life.

Each one of us in Carnegie Hall tonight and countless others in every corner of the world, have contributed in utterly indispensable ways, as artists, collaborators, administrators, donors, supporters and spokespeople, to make this extraordinary night come to fruition, to alleviate the suffering of our fellow men, women and especially children on the other side of the world. To every single one of you, I say from the bottom of my heart and spirit,

THANK YOU!


George Mathew
Artistic Director