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