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Program
Notes to
DSO's
New World
from
the pen of Maestro Amado
Friday,
January 25, 2013 / 7:30 p.m.
Sunday,
January 27, 2013 / 2:00 p.m.
At
The
Grand Opera House
David Amado,
conductor
Lura Johnson,
piano
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Ticket holders are invited to a pre-concert talk led by David Amado held in the
Wesler Room at The Grand Opera House one hour prior to each
performance. |
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 Humperdinck (1854-1921) - Prelude to Hansel and
Gretel
Engelbert Humperdinck.
The
stupendousness of his name was surpassed only by his impressive
moustache and his even more impressive musical gift.
Well-connected to
the high-powered German music scene, Humperdinck was good friends with
Anton Seidl, Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner. Strauss
conducted the
premier of Humperdinck’s only huge success, the children’s opera Hansel
and Gretel, calling it an authentic German masterpiece,
and Wagner’s
influence can be heard clearly in the beloved work. But where
Wagner
tends toward the grandly Teutonic, Humperdinck leans more toward the
gemütlich.
The prelude to Hansel
and Gretel is filled with a
mastery of formal control colored by a folksiness and directness of
spirit that makes it a favorite of both audiences and
musicians.
Additionally, it is always fun to say “Engelbert Humperdinck.” However,
when the great English actor and impresario, Augustus Harris, came to
America to produce Hansel
and Gretel, he said to the audience that he
hoped that “there was enough artistic spirit in America to appreciate
the wonderful work of this great composer, Pumpernickel.”
Engelbert
Pumpernickel!
 Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) - Piano
Concerto No. 1 in F-Sharp Minor, op. 1
Sergei Rachmaninoff did not have
a
moustache. Clean-shaven, and with his head shorn closely,
Rachmaninoff
looked impassive and severe. There are dozens of portraits of
him
unsmiling, stern and cold. It is a surprise, then, to hear
his music.
Though rarely buoyant and light-hearted, his work, in the style of the
great 19th century Russian composers, is always warm, generous,
romantic, and unashamed of its own sentiment. His First Piano Concerto,
modeled closely on a piano concerto of Edward Grieg, is filled with
gorgeous tunes, sweeping romantic gestures and heart-rending harmonies,
all delivered with Rachmaninoff’s trademark virtuosity. The
two outer
movements bristle with pianistic pyrotechnics while the middle
movement, though not devoid of high-density passages, is a lyrical, and
relatively brief, nocturne in one of Rachmaninoff’s most luminescent
keys: D major. Although programmed less frequently than its siblings,
the First Piano Concerto
remains a gorgeous testament to one of the
late 19th and 20th Century’s most distinctive and important voices.
 Dvořák (1841-1904) - Symphony No. 9, op. 95,
E-minor "From the New World"
Years before Charles Ives and
George
Gershwin celebrated the rich musical landscape of their native land, a
Bohemian came to New York and showed the world “American
music.” While
at home, Antonin Dvořák explored the music of his native Bohemia,
incorporating folk songs, and the style of folk song, into his concert
music. When he came to New York as the new director of a
conservatory,
he was eager to do the same with American music. He was
surprised that
so many American composers of concert music so readily overlooked the
rich lode of their own native music in favor of the style and language
of European composers. But Dvořák celebrated just what so
many
Americans forsook—the music and culture of Africa and of Native
Americans. With an ear for melodic poignancy and rhythmic
finesse
honed thousands of miles east through his Polkas, Furiants, and Dumkas,
Dvořák set out to incorporate the language and rhetoric of the New
World into the vessels of the Old. The New World Symphony
is perhaps
the best known of Dvořák’s East-meets-West ventures. It is a
work
filled with Americana—spirituals, Native American dance rhythms,
syncopations, folk song—all cast into a traditional four-movement
symphonic form. But the New
World’s appeal goes far beyond simply a
heartfelt homage to America. It is written with Dvořák’s
characteristic compositional discipline—brilliantly squeezing every
possible drop of inventiveness and utility from the most humble
motives, spinning gorgeous tunes out of ordinary fragments, and
unifying large-scale forms with a natural ease that escaped most other
composers.
While in New York, Dvořák, affectionately known as “Old
Borax,” presented a foreboding first impression, with “fierce Slavonic
eyes” and a face that looked like “an angry bulldog with a
beard.” But
all who met him soon discovered a sweet and mild-mannered
man. Though
his music is often lit from within by those fierce Slavonic eyes, its
deeply human, gentle nature is what keeps us coming back to listen to
it again and again.
Spring 2013
Classical Series
DSO's
New World
January
2013
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Beethoven's
World
March
2013 |
Tchaikovsky's World
April
2013 |
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