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Lidiya Yankovskaya

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Gil Shaham

Wolf Trap Opera

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National Symphony Orchestra

Symphony No. 9, op. 95 -  (Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, op. 95 B. 178)

Vienna

United States

Filene Center

Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, Op. 95 ("From the New World"), B. 178 Dvořák,A (+2 More)

Public

Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, op. 95 B. 178

My Fatherland

Violin Concerto in D Major, op. 35

Approved

Vltava (The Moldau) from Má Vlast (My Country) (1874)
Bedřich Smetana
Born March 2, 1824 in Leitomischl, Bohemia.
Died May 12, 1884 in Prague.

Early in 1874, Smetana began to suffer from severe headaches. This symptom came and went, and he noted no other physical problems until October. “One night I listened with great pleasure to Leo Delibes’ Le Roi l’a dit,” he reported. “When I returned home after the last act, I sat at the piano and improvised for an hour on whatever came into my head. The following morning I was stone deaf.” Smetana was terrified. He wrote to his friend J. Finch Thorne that a ceaseless rushing filled his head: “It is stronger when my brain is active and less noticeable when I am quiet. When I compose it is always in evidence.” He tried many unguents, ointments, and treatments during the ensuing months but they brought no relief—Smetana did not hear a sound for the last decade of his life. He continued to compose but withdrew more and more from the world as he realized he could not be cured, eventually losing his reason (in the margin of score of the 1882 D minor Quartet he scrawled, “Composed in a state of disordered nerves—the outcome of my deafness”) and ending his days in a mental ward.

It is one of the great ironies in 19th-century music that Smetana conceived the first melody for Má Vlast (My Country), the splendid cycle of six tone poems inspired by the land and lore of his native Bohemia, at the same time that he lost his hearing. Had he not been able to look to the example of the deaf Beethoven, he might well have abandoned this work, but he pressed on and completed Vyšehrad by November 1874 and immediately began The Moldau, which was finished in less than three weeks, on December 8th. Sárka and From Bohemia’s Woods and Meadows date from the following year; Tábor was finished in 1878 and Blaník in 1879.

The Moldau (Vltava in Czech) is the principal river of the Czech Republic, rising in the hills in the south and flowing north through Prague to join with the Elbe. Smetana’s tone poem seems to trace its inspiration to a country trip he took along the river in 1870, a junket that included an exhilarating boat ride through the churning waters of the St. John Rapids. The Moldau is disposed in several sections intended to convey both the sense of a journey down the river and some of the sights seen along the way, as Smetana noted in his preface to the score:

“Two springs pour forth in the shade of the Bohemian Forest, one warm and gushing, the other cold and peaceful. Their waves, gaily flowing over rocky beds, join and glisten in the rays of the morning sun. The forest brook, hastening on, becomes the river Moldau. Coursing through Bohemia’s valleys, it grows into a mighty stream. Through thick woods it flows, as the gay sounds of the hunt and the notes of the hunter’s horn are heard ever nearer. It flows through grass-grown pastures and lowlands where a wedding feast is being celebrated with song and dance. At night, wood and water nymphs revel in its sparkling waves. Reflected on its surface are fortresses and castles—witnesses of bygone days of knightly splendor and the vanished glory of fighting times. At the St. John Rapids, the stream races ahead, winding through the cataracts, hewing out a path with its foaming waves through the rocky chasm into the broad riverbed—finally, flowing on in majestic peace toward Prague and welcomed by the time-honored castle Vysehrad. [At this point, Smetana recalled the main theme of the complete cycle’s preceding tone poem, entirely devoted to depicting the ruined castle and its aura of ancient battles and forgotten bards.] Then it vanishes far beyond the poet’s gaze.”

Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D major, Op. 35 (1878)
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Born May 7, 1840 in Votkinsk.
Died November 6, 1893 in St. Petersburg.

In the summer of 1877, Tchaikovsky undertook the disastrous marriage that lasted less than three weeks and resulted in his emotional collapse and attempted suicide. He fled from Moscow to his brother Modeste in St. Petersburg, where he recovered his wits and discovered he could find solace in his work. He spent the late fall and winter completing his Fourth Symphony and the opera Eugene Onégin. The brothers decided that travel outside Russia would be an additional balm to the composer’s spirit, and they duly installed themselves at Clarens on Lake Geneva in Switzerland soon after the first of the year.

In Clarens, Tchaikovsky had already begun work on a piano sonata when he heard the colorful Symphonie espagnole by the French composer Edouard Lalo. He was so excited by the possibilities of a work for solo violin and orchestra that he set aside the sonata and immediately began a concerto of his own. By the end of April, the composition was finished. Tchaikovsky sent the manuscript to Leopold Auer, a friend who headed the violin department at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and who was also Court Violinist to the Czar, hoping to have him premiere the piece. Much to the composer’s regret, Auer returned the piece as “unplayable,” and apparently spread that word with such authority to other violinists that it was more than three years before the Violin Concerto was heard in public. It was Adolf Brodsky, a former colleague of Tchaikovsky at the Moscow Conservatory, who first accepted the challenge of this Concerto when he premiered it with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1881.

Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto opens quietly with a tentative introductory tune. After a few unaccompanied measures, the violin presents the lovely main theme. The second theme begins a long buildup leading into the development, launched with a sweeping presentation of the main theme. A flashing cadenza serves as a link to the recapitulation. The Andante suggests the music of a Gypsy fiddler. The finale is imbued with the spirit of a fiery Russian dance.

Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95, “From the New World” (1892-1893)
Antonín Dvořák
Born September 8, 1841 in Nelahozeves, Bohemia.
Died May 1, 1904 in Prague.

When Antonín Dvořák arrived in New York in September 1892 to direct the new National Conservatory of Music, both he and the institution’s founder, Mrs. Jeanette Thurber, expected he would foster an American school of composition. He said, “I am convinced the future music of this country must be founded on what are called Negro melodies. They can be the foundation of a serious and original school of composition in the United States.” The “New World” Symphony was not only Dvořák’s way of pointing toward a truly American musical idiom but also a reflection of his own feelings about the country. “I should never have written the Symphony as I have,” he said, “if I hadn’t seen America.”

The “New World” Symphony is unified by the use of a motto theme that occurs in all four movements. This bold, arching phrase is played by the horns as the main theme of the opening movement, having been foreshadowed in the slow introduction. Two other themes are used in the first movement: a sad melody for flute and oboe that exhibits folk characteristics, and a brighter tune resembling the spiritual Swing Low, Sweet Chariot for the solo flute. The second movement was inspired by the forest funeral of Minnehaha in Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, and the third by the dance of the Indians at the feast. The finale employs a sturdy motive introduced by the horns and trumpets after a few introductory measures in the strings.

©2022 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

English

Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, op. 95 B. 178 by Dvořák, My Fatherland by Smetana, Violin Concerto in D Major, op. 35 by Tchaikovsky, P. I., Alates (2022/2022), Dirigent Lidiya Yankovskaya, Filene Center, Vienna, United States

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