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DVOŘÁK
Serenade for Winds
Symphony No. 9
‘From the New World’
London Symphony Orchestra
Wiener Philharmoniker
István Kertész
ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841-1904)
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Serenade for Winds in D minor, Op. 44
I
Moderato, quasi marcia
II
Minuetto (Tempo di minuetto)
III Andante con moto
IV Finale (Allegro molto)
3’19
6’10
8’28
6’03
London Symphony Orchestra
István Kertész
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Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95 ‘From the New World’
I
Adagio – Allegro molto
II
Largo
III Scherzo (molto vivace)
IV Allegro con fuoco
Wiener Philharmoniker
István Kertész
Total timing: 64’45
9’43
11’45
7’37
11’08
Antonín Dvo řák was born in the Bohemian
village of Nelahozeves in 1841. Finishing school
at age eleven, Tonik, as he was called as a child,
was apprenticed to his butcher father. Not long
after, he was sent to another small town,
Zlonice, to learn German, in the hope that this
might improve his career prospects (Bohemia
was then under Austrian rule). His teacher,
Antonín Liehmann, was a musician, and
recognised Dvořák’s talent. German lessons were
abandoned in favour of instruction in harmony,
counterpoint, organ, viola, violin and piano.
In 1857 Liehmann arranged for Dvořák to study
at the Organ school in Prague. After graduating
he earned a living mainly through teaching. He
also spent much time playing viola in the
Bohemian Provisional Theatre orchestra under
Bohemia’s premier composer, Bedřich Smetana.
A competition for impoverished composers in
1874 encouraged Dvořák to enter some of his
compositions. He won the cash prize, and also
the attention of Brahms, one of the adjudicators.
Brahms recommended Dvořák’s Moravian
Duets to his publisher Simrock, who brought out
both the duets and a newly commissioned work
in 1878. Dvořák was then 37; from that time on
his reputation grew, with his works being played
in Germany, England and America. Hans von
Bülow’s 1877 reference to Dvořák as ‘next to
Brahms, the most God-gifted composer of the
present day’ was finally matched by international
recognition.
In 1891 Dvořák received a telegram from a
Mrs. Jeannette M. Thurber, inviting him to direct
her National Conservatory of Music in New York.
He accepted only after negotiating some
conditions, which included him teaching only
the best students as well as a generous salary.
On 26 September of the same year he arrived in
the United States with his wife and two of his
six children. Dvořák’s duties at the Conservatory
were light. He spent six hours a week teaching
composition and attended the odd
administration meeting. His most important task
was to create interest in a new American style.
The six concerts his contract required him to
conduct failed to materialise, after his first and
only concert was financially unsuccessful.
Emanuel Rubin, author of the chapter on the
composer’s experiences at the National
Conservatory in John C. Tibbetts’s book Dvořák
in America, 1892-1895, writes, ‘The concert
was a powerful demonstration of the school’s
philosophy’ which was to provide quality tuition
to the most talented students, regardless of race,
gender or financial status. (This philosophy gave
the school an enviable reputation but poor
monetary returns: one reason why Dvořák did
not renew his contract in 1895.) The New York
Herald reported that ‘Each soloist, with one
exception, belonged to the coloured race’;
another student’s Plantation Dances were
premiered. It is no wonder that Dvo řák
developed an interest in the music of black
Americans during his time at the Conservatory.
He befriended student Harry T. Burleigh, who
sang him black spirituals. In his public statements
Dvo řák promoted African American, and later,
Native American music as the basis of an
American national style.
Dvořák’s best-known contribution to American
music is the ‘New World’ Symphony, premiered
by the New York Philharmonic in 1893. Despite
the work’s immediate success, it proved
controversial: is it really American, or Bohemian,
with a patriotic nickname added to appease the
expectant audience? Maybe one of the
composer’s ‘little jokes’, as his secretary
suggested. Dvořák wrote that ‘anyone with a
nose’ could detect the work’s American
influences. But he was no ethnomusicologist: his
understanding of Native and African American
music was shaped by his fairly traditional
education. Like Mendelssohn, he could offer
only his impressions of his new surroundings.
Speaking to the Herald, Dvořák commented ‘…
the music of the two races (African and Native
American) bore a remarkable similarity to the
national music of Scotland’. The distinctive
Scotch snap rhythm, also common in eastern
European music, and a pentatonic scale are
present in the first movement, in a catchy theme
introduced by the horns. The next theme is
supported by a drone bass, another nationalistic
colouring, and the third, written for the lowest
register of the flute, recalls ‘Swing low, sweet
chariot’ (which the homesick Dvořák perhaps
wished would carry him home).
The Largo second movement was ‘in reality a
study or sketch for a longer work … based on
Longfellow’s Hiawatha.’ Published in 1855 and
first encountered by Dvořák as early as the
1870s, The Song of Hiawatha is long narrative
poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Relating
the life of Hiawatha, an American Indian, it is
partly inspired by the Finnish Kalevala and
American Indian legends. Commentator Jack
Sullivan writes that the poem’s ‘frank primitivism
was precisely what he [Dvořák] was striving for
in New World art.’ He believes it appealed to
Dvořák’s background in its pastoral imagery and
sympathy for America’s native inhabitants. The
portion of the poem depicted in this movement
is ‘The Wooing’ of Minnehaha, Hiawatha’s love
from an enemy tribe; its cor anglais theme is an
equally poignant expression of loneliness.
The Scherzo, representing ‘Hiawatha’s
Wedding Feast’, comprises three sections: a
dance, a love song, and the tale that the storyteller Iagoo relates in the following chapter of
the poem. The story, in which the protagonists
are turned into ‘birds of various plumage’
(before one is shot down by an arrow and all
become pygmies) must have been irresistible to
Dvo řak, who had a lifelong fascination with
birds. The story is depicted in the trio, with its
numerous twittering trills.
Dvořák’s ‘Hiawatha’ symphony, as some suggest
it be called, ends with a pot-pourri of the
symphony’s themes, ingeniously transformed
and arranged. Perhaps tired of the controversy
surrounding his Bohemian/American creation,
Dvořák declared: ‘I was, I am and I remain a
Czech composer. I have only showed them the
path they might take – how they should work.
But I’m through with that! From this day
forward I will write the way I wrote before!’
Jennifer Butler
Dvořák intended to write three serenades for
small orchestra, but in fact completed only two
of them – the Serenade in E major, Op. 22 for
strings (1875), and the Serenade in D minor, Op.
44 for winds, with string bass (1878). The third
work became the Czech Suite, Op. 39, of 1879.
The D minor Serenade was composed at white
heat between 4 and 18 January 1878 (the first
movement was finished in one day), and was
first performed at a concert of Dvo řák’s works
given under his own direction by the orchestra
of the Czech ‘Interim’ Theatre in Prague on 17
November of the same year. The score was
published in Berlin by Simrock in April 1879,
with a dedication to the German music critic
Louis Ehlert, probably as an expression of
gratitude for his enthusiastic review in the
Berliner Nationalzeitung of Dvořák’s Moravian
Duets, Op. 32, and of the first set of Slavonic
Dances, Op. 46.
Dvořák’s work is a conscious re-creation of the
spirit of the eighteenth-century wind serenade,
the cello and bass providing, for most of the
time, little more than a foundation for the wind
band (which consists of two oboes, two
clarinets, two bassoons, optional contrabassoon, and three horns). The first movement
is in ternary form, and is in the style of a march
– a direct allusion to eighteenth-century practice.
The opening and closing sections (whose theme,
like all the principal themes throughout the
work, begins with an ascending interval of a
fourth) are deliberately heavy and rather
pompous; the middle section (in F major) is
derived from a lilting motif announced by the
two clarinets. The Minuet (in F) is, as Dvorák
ˇ
scholar Otakar Šourek has pointed out, in the
style of a sousedská, a slow dance-form used by
Dvořák on several occasions in his Slavonic
Dances; much use is made of the sliding foursemiquaver figure played by the clarinets in the
fifth bar. The Trio (in B flat) is marked Presto, and
is in the style of a furiant: full of syncopations
and dynamic contrasts, and with rhythmic
impetus provided by a wavering motif in thirds
derived from the semiquaver figure of the
Minuet itself.
In the rhapsodic Andante con moto in A, the
perceptiveness and resource of Dvořák’s scoring
is perhaps seen at its most masterly. The
movement has the character of a nocturne, and
its main theme is a particularly beautiful
cantilena intoned by clarinet and oboe in turn.
The cheerful finale is a sort of rondo – though
distinctly unorthodox in design. It opens with a
bold idea in octaves that is loosely related to the
march theme of the first movement. A theme
on the bass instruments quickly takes over from
it, however, and when the ‘refrain’ eventually
returns it does so in a slightly altered, more
‘rustic’ form: in sixths on the clarinets. Two
further episodes are provided by an attractive
interlude in the style of a gentle polka and by a
reappearance of the march theme from the first
movement, before an exuberant coda brings the
work to a resounding finish in D major.
Robin Golding
PHOTO: DECCA/ELFRIEDE HANAK
István Kertész
István Kertész, born in 1929, trained as a
conductor, composer and violinist in his native
Budapest. He and his immediate family stood
their ground during the German invasion of
Hungary – Kertész was Jewish – and the Soviet
takeover. Ultimately, however, he left his
homeland in 1957, shortly after the Hungarian
Revolution had been put down by Soviet forces.
Appointments in Augsburg and Cologne were
followed by his being named Principal
Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra,
where he succeeded Pierre Monteux. He served
in that role between 1965 and 1968. He was
only 43 when he drowned while swimming in
the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Israel. In
addition to his highly acclaimed Mozart
recordings, he also recorded the complete
symphonies of Schubert (with the Wiener
Philharmoniker) and Dvořák (with the LSO) for
Decca. His first recording with the Wiener
Philharmoniker was this account of Dvo řák’s
‘New World’ symphony and the sessions,
according to producer Ray Minshull, had a lot of
nervous energy. It remains one of the most
passionate and explosive recordings of the work.
.
ISTVÁN KERTÉSZ on DECCA ELOQUENCE
KODÁLY: The Peacock;
Peacock Variations;
Hary Janos: suite;
Dances of Galanta
MOZART: Symphonies
Nos. 33, 39, 40
SHOSTAKOVICH:
Symphony No. 5
MOZART:
Symphony No. 36 ‘Linz’;
Eine kleine Nachtmusik;
March in C; Overtures
476 2453
466 6642
450 1102
476 7437
RESPIGHI: Pines of Rome;
Fountains of Rome;
The Birds
KODÁLY: Hary Janos
BARTÓK: Duke
Bluebeard's Castle
476 7403
476 7402
MOZART: Symphonies
Nos. 25, 29, 35 ‘Haffner’
DVOŘAK: Requiem
ROSSINI: Stabat Mater
480 4873 (2CD)
480 4873
KODÁLY: Choral works
BARTÓK: Cantata profana
476 7401
476 9781
MOZART OPERA FESTIVAL
480 4853 (2CD)
480 4870 (2CD)
MOZART: Requiem;
Masonic Music
DVOŘAK: Symphony
No. 9; Serenade for
wind instruments
480 4850 (2CD)
BRAHMS: Symphonies
Nos. 1-4; Serenades Nos. 1
& 2; Haydn Variations
DVOŘAK: Overtures &
Tone Poems
480 4847
480 4839 (4CD)
480 4848
BRUCKNER:
Symphony No. 4
BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY
Recording producers: Ray Minshull, (Symphony); Erik Smith (Serenade)
Recording engineers: James Brown (Symphony); Kenneth Wilkinson (Serenade)
Recording locations: Sofiensaal, Vienna, Austria, March 1961 (Symphony); Kingsway Hall,
London, UK, May 1968 (Serenade)
Eloquence series manager: Cyrus Meher-Homji
Art direction: Chilu · www.chilu.com
Booklet editor: Bruce Raggatt
480 4847