In 2020, the world was set to celebrate Ludwig van Beethoven's 250th anniversary. The Beethoven Festival in Bonn was supposed to be the highlight of the year for musicAeterna. There, under the batons of Teodor Currentzis and Giovanni Antonini, the ensemble would perform the full cycle of Beethoven's symphonies. In April and May, the orchestra would also present the same programme in Vienna, Lucerne, Seoul and Tokyo. Yet the tour had barely started with concerts in Moscow and Saint Petersburg...

...when life forced us to abandon any plans we had. The further concerts got cancelled.

Still, we kept rehearsing at Dom Radio, our home residence in Saint Petersburg. The enforced break in our tour allowed us to develop Plan B. We decided to record Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for Sony Classical and started working on that project.

Yet we happened to be one step behind: one by one, European countries began closing their borders, so our guest musicians and soloists found themselves separated from the orchestra.

We pressed on with the rehearsals, though. Those went on till March 16. The chronicle of the final days before the time of enforced silence gave birth to this work.

This is a collective pondering by Teodor Currentzis and Sergey Nurmamed. The story of overcoming total restrictions.

We invited musicAeterna musicians to join the orchestra from all around the world: Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal...

Music is not the only thing in this video.
Friends of musicAeterna - stage directors, artists and musicians - join us in an attempt to comprehend the new time of total isolation.

This visual pondering is an attempt to process the situation we have all become part of. An attempt to overcome the restrictions and to outsmart the fears of the troubled time.

MusicAeterna's Plan B is still in force. We are willing to record Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and hoping to create an even bigger project as soon as the borders reopen and the musicians are able to gather at Dom Radio in Russia.

This project is about today's world and our collective hardships. It is an opportunity to process the things happening to each of us now. It is our little story about the upcoming big changes - hopefully.

Casting

• musicAeterna
• Teodor Currentzis (Conductor)

Director: Sergey Nurmamed
Duration: 00:34