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A guide to the music of Beethoven's piano concerto No.4. As if to underline this ‘opposite is also true’ thesis, Beethoven based the Fourth Piano Concerto’s long first movement on the same rhythmic pattern as the famous da-da-da-DAH ‘Fate’ motif that launches the Fifth Symphony. But it’s hard to imagine anything less like that ...
Jun 26, 2017 · Alan Gilbert’s final performance as music director of the New York Philharmonic came on June 14. The outdoor concert on Central Park’s Great Lawn, attended by some 50,000 people, included Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony, appropriately the same piece which opened the Philharmonic’s 2016/17 season (video below).
- Slavonic Dances Op. 46 and 72
- String Quartet No. 10
- Violin Concerto
- Symphony No. 7
- Piano Quintet No. 2, Op. 81
- Symphony No. 8
- Carnival Overture, Op. 92
- Piano Trio No. 4, “Dumky”
- String Quartet No. 12, “American”
- Symphony No. 9, “From The New World”
A series of 16 orchestral pieces composed over the span of a single decade, Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances were originally written with a piano and four hands in mind. The composer had encountered Brahms’s recent Hungarian Dances in the late 1870s, and at the request of his publisher, turned his elegantly lilting piano pieces into full-scale symphonic po...
Not long after publishing his Slavonic Dances, Dvořák was approached by prominent German violinist-composer Jean Becker, who wanted a new work for his Florentine Quartet. The resulting String Quartet in E-flat Major, though dedicated to Becker, was ultimately premiered by a different quartet at a private recital in 1879. The style of the four-movem...
A defining work in the violin repertoire, this concerto was written for Hungarian prodigy Joseph Joachim, one of Dvořák’s favorite violinists. When it was finished in 1879, however, Joachim was put off by many of the composer’s revolutionary ideas for the form: A punctilious classicist, Joachim didn’t appreciate how the adagio of the second movemen...
While subtle and modest in size, Dvořák’s Seventh is often counted among the greatest of the composer’s nine symphonies. It was commissioned by the London Philharmonic Society, which in 1884 invited Dvořák to become an honorary member in return for a new symphony. This was Dvořák’s only such commission, and it clearly inspired him: He set to task w...
Between August and October 1887, Dvořák composed his Piano Quintet in A Major at Vysok. At the time, he was reviewing the many unpublished works created during his years of obscurity and revising some of them for his publisher. Decades later, his beloved second piano quintet would receive its Carnegie Hall premiere in Carnegie Lyceum (now Zankel Ha...
Dvořák’s Eighth is the most straightforwardly “Bohemian” of this nationalistic composer’s later symphonies. Whereas in the Seventh Symphony Dvořák had reined in his overtly nationalist tendencies to write a more internationally “relatable” work—and explored African American and Indigenous American material in the Ninth—in the Eighth Symphony, Dvořá...
Composed in 1891 as part of a romantic “Nature, Life, and Love” trilogy of overtures, this orchestral Carnivalwas intended for the second part: life. Fast and festive, it’s written in the jubilant key of A major, and features a full ensemble of strings, winds, and even tambourine. As per its title, the work nods to the spirited bedlam of a carnival...
One of Dvořák’s most popular chamber works, the “Dumky” Trio takes its name from the Slavic folk ballads, typically melancholy in nature, that provided inspiration for numerous 19th- and 20th-century composers. Eager to reassert his Czech heritage, Dvořák based the work’s six movements on dumkyof varying temperaments. He wrote the trio shortly befo...
The shortest of Dvořák’s 14 string quartets, the “American” is among his most accessible works, despite its formal and thematic brevity. “I wanted for once to write something very melodious and simple, and I always kept Papa Haydn before my eyes,” the composer told a friend back home in Bohemia. The germ of the quartet seems to have been the song o...
Since its epochal world premiere at Carnegie Hall in 1893, Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony has become one of America’s most popular orchestral works and is considered a breakthrough in its use of African American musical idioms—though it also spawned some controversy. The work was composed in New York City, and it drew from a wide array of source mat...
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Officially, the “New World Symphony” is Antonin Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95, B. 178, and subtitled “From the New World.”. Of course, everyone simply calls it the “New World Symphony.”. Dvořák composed the symphony over the first half of 1893, and it was premiered by the New York Philharmonic on December 13, 1893 ...
Sep 24, 2021 · The pianist Yefim Bronfman as the soloist in Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, performed by the New York Philharmonic on Thursday and led by Jaap van Zweden. Hiroyuki Ito for The New...
Dec 29, 2020 · In 1806, Beethoven wrote his Violin Concerto in D major, op. 61. In 1807, he took the work that was clearly more pianistic than violinistic and rewrote it for piano as Op. 61a. Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano Concerto in D Major, Op. 61a – III. Rondo (Daniel Barenboim, piano; English Chamber Orchestra; Daniel Barenboim, cond.)
Jan 26, 2019 · Composed between January 10 and May 24, 1893 in New York City, “New World” was the first of Dvořák’s so called “American works.” With its references to Negro spirituals, the plantation songs of Stephen Foster, and Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha,” it has also been called the first great American symphony.
