Overture Magazine - 2015-2016 Season May-June 2016 | Page 39

program notes { recordings include Mendelssohn Trios with Emanuel Ax and Itzhak Perlman, and The Goat Rodeo Sessions, with Edgar Meyer, Chris Thile and Stuart Duncan, which received the 2013 Grammy for best folk album and A Playlist Without Borders, recorded with the Silk Road Ensemble. His new album, Songs from the Arc of Life, with pianist Kathryn Stott, was released in September 2015.  Born in 1955 to Chinese parents living in Paris, Mr. Ma began to study the cello with his father at age four. His family moved to New York when he was seven years old, and he studied with Leonard Rose at the Juilliard School. Mr. Ma graduated from Harvard University in 1976. He has received numerous awards, including the Avery Fisher Prize (1978), the Glenn Gould Prize (1999), the National Medal of the Arts (2001), the Dan David Prize (2006), the Sonning Prize (2006), the World Economic Forum’s crystal award (2008), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2010), the Polar Music Prize (2012) and the Vilcek Prize in Contemporary Music (2013). In 2011, Mr. Ma was recognized as a Kennedy Center honoree. He has performed for eight American presidents, most recently at the invitation of President Obama on the occasion of the 56th Inaugural Ceremony. Yo-Yo Ma last appeared with the BSO in September 2008, performing Tchaikovsky's Variations on a Rococo Theme, Marin Alsop, conductor. About the concert: Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, “From the New World” Antonín Dvořák Born in Nelahozeves, Bohemia (now Czech Republic), September 8, 1841; died in Prague, May 1, 1904 At its premiere in the newly opened Carnegie Hall on December 16, 1893, Dvořák’s last symphony, “From the New World,” was perhaps the greatest triumph of the composer’s career, and it has continued to rank among the most popular of all symphonies. Yet from its first reviews, commentators have asked the question: “Is this symphony really American?” In other words, how much is it “from the new world” and how much “from the old world”? The Largo slow movement is one of the most beautiful Dvořák ever wrote. A man who drew on his Czech peasant roots both for personal values and artistic inspiration, Dvořák found much to treasure in American folk traditions. While white Americans were inclined to undervalue the spirituals of black Americans, Dvořák was enraptured by them. One of his students was Harry T. Burleigh, an African American with a fine baritone voice who was to become an important arranger of spirituals and writer of American art songs. As Burleigh remembered, Dvořák “literally saturated himself with Negro song … I sang our Negro songs for him very often, and before he wrote his own themes, he filled himself with the spirit of the old Spirituals.” Although pointing out the resemblance between the second theme in the “New World’s” first movement and the opening of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” Burleigh stressed, as did Dvořák himself, that the Czech did not actually quote from American tunes but used them to inspire his own original themes. Later the process came full circle when another Dvořák pupil, William Arms Fisher, created a popular quasispiritual, “Goin’ Home,” from Dvořák’s magnificent English horn melody in the “New World’s” slow movement. With his sensitive antennae, Dvořák absorbed the vitality and brashness of America in the 1890s (“The enthusiasm of most Americans for all things new is apparently without limit. It is the essence of what is called ‘push’—American push,” he observed) as well as the soulfulness of spirituals, and all this influenced his new symphony of “impressions and greetings from the New World.” He declared, “I should never have written the symphony as I have if I hadn’t seen America.” The drive of the first and last movements as well as the syncopated rhythms and melodic shapes of many of the themes did indeed give this symphony a unique voice. But, as Burleigh wrote, “the workmanship and treatment of the themes … is Bohemian.” The fruitful mixture of American inspiration and Czech sensibility is best summed up by the fact that both Americans and Czechs consider this symphony their own. The first movement’s slow introduction hints at the principal theme, which, as the tempo quickens, is introduced by the horns. Motto-like, this theme will recur in all movements. Dvořák seems to capture the spirit of “American push” in this driving, optimistic music. Listen for the hints of “Swing Low” in the second theme, a merry tune for flutes and oboes. A prodigal melodist, Dvořák also offers a third theme, bright and full of “can-do” spirit, in the solo flute. The Largo slow movement is one of the most beautiful Dvořák ever wrote. Here is the great “Goin’ Home” melody for English horn, an instrument chosen by the composer because it reminded him of Burleigh’s baritone voice. The composer loved Longfellow’s poem Song of Hiawatha and claimed this music was inspired by the death of Hiawatha’s bride, but many, including Dvořák’s sons, heard more of his homesickness for his native land. A poignant middle section in the minor presents two haunting melodies for woodwinds above shuddering strings. Dvořák also cited “a fea