Dave Har p
{ Program Notes
The BSO
Chamber Music Festival. He combines
almost every engagement with either
outreach or masterclasses, reaching out
to young audiences from kindergarten to
college and beyond.
Born into a musical family in 1979 as
a dual citizen of Germany and Canada,
Moser was the top prize winner at the
2002 Tchaikovsky Competition. He
now holds a professorship in Cologne,
Germany. An avid outdoorsman, New
York-based Johannes Moser has crossed
the Alps on his mountain bike.
Johannes Moser is making his
BSO debut.
About the concert:
Serenade for Strings in E Major,
opus 22
Antonín Dvořák
Born in Nelahozeves, Bohemia, now Czech
Republic, September 8, 1841; died in Prague,
May 1, 1904
32 O v ertur e |
www. bsomusic .org
Written in May 1875,
Dvořák’s gorgeous
Serenade for Strings
reflects the joy of the new
opportunities awaiting him.
Antonín Dvořák might have languished
far longer in Bohemian obscurity had he
not come to the attention of Johannes
Brahms in the mid-1870s. The wellestablished Brahms was then serving
on a committee to award stipends to
talented but undiscovered composers living in outlying provinces of the
Austrian Empire. Deeply impressed by
Dvořák’s submitted compositions, he
not only voted for him to receive the
prize money but also went to his own
publisher Simrock to urge that it take
on the young composer. Thus began a
profitable relationship with the Berlin
publishing house, and Dvořák was on
his way to becoming a household name
among European music lovers.
Written in May 1875, Dvořák’s gorgeous Serenade for Strings reflects the
joy of the new opportunities awaiting
him. There are strong relationships
between this work and Tchaikovsky’s
better-known Serenade for Strings:
both feature an enchanting waltz as a
second movement and both bring back
their beautiful first-movement themes
in closing. But, in fact, Dvořák did it
first, composing his Serenade five years
before Tchaikovsky’s.
Dvořák’s Serenade handsomely
displays two of his finest compositional
gifts. First, as an accomplished string
player himself— for years he supported
his family as principal violist of Prague’s
opera house — he wrote superbly for
string instruments. And, secondly, he
was one of the greatest melodists classical music has ever produced.
As a demonstration of this, the first
movement, in a relaxed Moderato
tempo, features a principal theme of