A Birthday: Antonin Dvorák
Evening Music | May 6, 2010
In honor of Antonin Dvorák’s birthday (1841), we begin and end the evening with two old familiars: “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” and the “New World” Symphony.
Joshua Bell’s violin sings the melody of the famous song, while Leonard Bernstein leads the New York Philharmonic in the beloved “From the New World” or Ninth Symphony. Dvorák was under the influence of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha” when he composed this work, and the two inner movements have Indian motifs, while hints of African-American harmonies and rhythms are interspersed here and there. But Dvorak was always Dvorák, and the work is as much Slavic as it is American in feel.
The Kodaly Quartet, whose members all hail from Hungary and thus can be argued to have Haydn in their blood, brings us String Quartet in G, opus 64/4, from the father of quartet writing, Papa Haydn.
Another quartet, “Death and the Maiden,” Franz Schubert’s fourteenth in the genre, was written when he was in despair over his illness. He based the second-movement variations on the song in which he had set the poetry of Matthias Claudius, and even the Presto finale continues the idea of death presaged since it sounds like a tarantellaa dance associated with death since the Middle Ages. The superb Tokyo String Quartet gives a luminous reading.
Joshua Bell’s violin sings the melody of the famous song, while Leonard Bernstein leads the New York Philharmonic in the beloved “From the New World” or Ninth Symphony. Dvorák was under the influence of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha” when he composed this work, and the two inner movements have Indian motifs, while hints of African-American harmonies and rhythms are interspersed here and there. But Dvorak was always Dvorák, and the work is as much Slavic as it is American in feel.
The Kodaly Quartet, whose members all hail from Hungary and thus can be argued to have Haydn in their blood, brings us String Quartet in G, opus 64/4, from the father of quartet writing, Papa Haydn.
Another quartet, “Death and the Maiden,” Franz Schubert’s fourteenth in the genre, was written when he was in despair over his illness. He based the second-movement variations on the song in which he had set the poetry of Matthias Claudius, and even the Presto finale continues the idea of death presaged since it sounds like a tarantellaa dance associated with death since the Middle Ages. The superb Tokyo String Quartet gives a luminous reading.
