Beethoven’s 70-minute Ninth Symphony invites no curtain raiser and precludes any chasers. Yet it isn’t absolutely unheard of for conductors to stretch out a program with a little something extra before locking the door on eternal latecomers. Perhaps it’s to that end that this performance will open with spirituals from Michael Tippett’s pacifist oratorio A Child of Our Time, written during W.W. II in response to Kristallnacht, the Nazis’ first thunderclap unleashed on Germany’s Jews. Tippett used spirituals—songs of America’s enslaved Blacks—the way J. S. Bach used Lutheran chorales. In theory, at least, there could be a real sense of convergence between Tippett’s message and Beethoven’s in his symphony’s concluding choral “Ode to Joy.” James Burton conducts the Tippett excerpts. Susanna Mälkki is on deck for the Beethoven. —Matthew Gurewitsch