I don’t have a favourite. But the sheeple amateurs in YT comments certainly do. The latest celebrity conductor conducting the Ninth wins them over. Never mind how well the Chorus performed the final movement. Did they sing with perfect intonation and excellent Deutsch diction? That seems irrelevant to the sheeple who write comments under YT videos. You say: “the amateurs don’t have a chorally-trained ear so they don’t know choral excellence when they hear it.” Well, that’s irrelevant to them.

If Dr Paul Traver’s superb University of Maryland Chorus were still around, their performances of Beethoven’s Ninth would be my favourite and that’s from a choral perspective. Decades ago, the first piece I heard them perform at Wolf Trap with the Kennedy Center’s National Symphony Orchestra was Beethoven’s Ninth. It was an outstanding performance. I had never heard the University of Maryland Chorus before but they left a lasting impression on me which I continue to talk about today. They were very sought after for their Beethoven’s Ninth. They performed the piece over 38 times. What other Orchestra Chorus can say that? The thinking at that time seemed to be: If you’re programming Beethoven’s Ninth, you must get the University of Maryland Chorus. That’s a given. Period.

When I was a chorister in the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, we performed the Ninth with conductor Kurt Masur. He was very good to work with. What I remember from that performance was that Masur held the word “Gott” with the fermata over it for about 10 seconds. I really liked that. It did require staggered breathing from the choristers. I scanned a few performances of the piece last night to see how long other conductors hold “Gott.” From the few performances I scanned through, the only conductor I found to match Masur was Markus Stenz in the Nederlands who holds “Gott” for about 10 seconds as well. Other conductors do not. Boring. But I suspect most people couldn’t care less about that or other technical aspects of the piece because they’re not trained musicians (including choristers), although many amateurs pretend to be. I saw no one mention anything about the length of time the word “Gott” was held in any comments. I suspect most of these people — mere amateurs — probably didn’t even notice. I suspect that most people listen to the Ninth quite differently than I do. I listen to it from a Chorus Director’s position or from the position of that of a chorister having sung the piece twice (San Francisco Symphony Chorus and Choral Arts Society of Washington with the National Symphony Orchestra). And the amateurs/wannabe musicians are usually quite intimidated by trained musicians and want nothing to do with them. The amateurs are wannabe musicians who wanted to be musicians but didn’t want to do the work required to be a musician and or didn’t posses the required talent and knew they could never get into a Conservatory or a University’s School of Music. So it’s much easier to write comments on YT pretending to be an authority on music, than to actually spend decades in training to become an artist.

Scanning the annoying comments from the amateur commenters on YT, most comments are all about emotion — stuff like this: “there are tears coming down my face from hearing this performance” (oh good lord people, get a fucking grip!) and people trying to be all philosophical and trying to come off as elitist. My friend asked me: Did you ever see anyone crying or in tears during or after performances of Beethoven’s Ninth? No, never. I never saw anyone in tears at any performance and it didn’t matter who was performing. On YT, no comments are written from a position of choral excellence. Of course many of the amateurs write about “best performance ever” — so tiresome — when they’ve not heard all performances of the piece, recorded or not, to make that silly judgment nor do they say what their judgment of “best performance ever” was based on. “Best performance ever” tells us nothing about what made said performance the “best performance ever” according to them. Was is for the orchestra’s superb performance or the performance of the Chorus, or both? And how were the four soloists? Usually they sound like a train wreck with the soprano screaming above all of them, as if it’s a competition. No perfect intonation from the four soloists and they don’t seem at all as if they’re trying to blend their voices, but rather out-scream each other, with few exceptions. But people never say what made a performance “the best ever.” Of the choral ensembles I heard last night when scanning through videos of the Ninth, some of the sopranos in the Chorus were cackling or sounding shrill which the amateurs describe as “awesome and amazing.” Obviously they know nothing about choral excellence. Unfortunately, anyone can write a comment or review of an Orchestra and Chorus whether they know anything about music or the piece at all.

From what I’ve observed, the performances of the Ninth routinely surround around cult-like worship of celebrity conductors and the Orchestra. Rarely is anything said about the Chorus. People lump the Chorus in with the Orchestra even if they are not at all related. Even if the Chorus is the Orchestra’s Chorus, the Chorus must be acknowledged/mentioned because the Chorus is not part of the Orchestra. That’s why it’s called: the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus.

Bottom Line: I do not at all relate to most of the comments under classical music videos that I see on YT. I find them frustrating and damn annoying, and quite sheeple. Yet they seem to try to come off as musically-trained experts.