Practicing since the first week of this semester, the Eastern Symphony Orchestra is getting ready to perform at the Dvorak Concert Hall in Doudna Fine Arts Center on Friday at 7:30 p.m. 

“Preparing for this concert has been a big learning experience and a lot of fun,” said Esme Bryson, an art and biology major and cello player in the orchestra. “I hope everyone who comes and listens to the performance will be, at least for a time, transported from their troubles and get lost in the great music.” 

Bryson joined the Eastern Symphony Orchestra to continue to play music as a creative outlet and to meet new people. 

The Eastern Symphony Orchestra, alongside the Eastern Illinois University Concert Choir, will be taking the audience through three selections of Ludwig van Beethoven’s music. 

The first selection will be an overture from early in Beethoven’s career followed by a selection from the middle of his career, “Piano Concerto No. 4,” and his last complete symphony, “Symphony No. 9,” which includes Friedrich Schiller’s poem, “Ode to Joy.” 

During “Piano Concerto No. 4,” Shichao Zhang, director of keyboard division and instructor of piano, will perform a solo. 

“It begins with the piano alone, an unprecedented gesture at the time, immediately establishing the soloist as an initiator of thought and emotion, rather than a virtuoso showman,” Zhang said. “The concerto unfolds as a profound dialogue between the piano and the orchestra — at times intimate and tender, at times dramatic and confrontational.” 

David Commanday, the conductor of the performance and the music director of the Eastern Symphony Orchestra, said any concerto is a conversation between the soloist and the orchestra. 

“In the case of Beethoven, he turns it into a collaborative encounter and conversation,” Commanday said. 

Beethoven began his career during the end of the classical period of music, which stretched from 1750 to 1820 and included the talents of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Mozart. 

“Beethoven was a great idealist but also very full of temperament and passion. He wanted his music to express both emotion and philosophy,” Commanday said. “He didn’t abandon the form that was part of his musical heritage from Haydn and Mozart, but he stretched it, and he expanded it.” 

Beethoven would add the piccolo, the contrabassoon, trombones, symbols and triangles to his orchestra, which were entirely new instruments to any orchestra at the time, according to Commanday. 

For “Symphony No. 9,” Beethoven made it longer and louder, in part by changing the finale to something different than the usual symphony ending. 

“He brings in a choir and four vocal soloists, like in opera. He chooses a poem by Friedrich Schiller, called ‘Ode to Joy,’ [which] was kind of a drinking song, [though] not quite as simple as that,” Commanday said. 

There are four vocal soloists in the finale of “Symphony No. 9,” including a soprano, a mezzo soprano, a tenor and a bass. 

“The finale goes back and forth from the orchestra to the chorus to the soloists and so forth, and it’s a big, amazing [and] ecstatic conclusion to the concert,” Commanday said.  

Beethoven’s “Piano Concerto No. 4” also has a history behind its premiere on Dec. 22, 1808. 

The premiere lasted more than four hours and was in a freezing cold venue where Beethoven himself played because no one else could do it, according to Commanday. 

“This concert is not nearly so long as that marathon, [but] it will give a lot of joy, and I think people should not miss it,” Commanday said.

Essie Newton can be reached at 581-2812 or eanewton@eiu.edu.