Program Notes: Dvořák New World Symphony

BÉLA BARTÓK  
Román népi táncok (Romanian Folk Dances), Sz. 68, BB 76 
BORN: March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary 
DIED: September 26, 1945, in New York City 
WORK COMPOSED: 1915 (original piano version); 1917 (Bartók’s orchestral arrangement) 

What to Listen For:  

• The six pieces included here are not much longer than a minute each, with the rapid, ornamental passages and added trills meant to mimic the improvisational style of folk musicians.   

In his own country, Béla Bartók was known far more for his systematic efforts to collect and notate folk music than for his own compositions. The folk legacy was a deep wellspring that informed a basic part of his musical vocabulary. However much his style evolved over the next many decades during which his music ran the gamut from aggressive dissonance to an almost nostalgic traditional tonality, a distinctive folk “accent” permeated his various adopted musical languages. 

The charming and deservedly popular Romanian Folk Dances are scarcely removed from their rustic origins. The short and formally simple dances grew from pieces Bartók had heard and recorded (on Edison cylinders) while collecting folk music in Transylvania between 1910 and 1912. Their exotic Central and Eastern European harmonies, set to quirky rhythms, have endeared them to succeeding generations of piano students playing the original keyboard versions, while concert audiences have appreciated the fresh colors resulting from Bartók’s orchestration. The dances are highly varied in tempo and mood, covering an emotional range from melancholy lyricism to jaunty exuberance. In their folk originals, the drone effects maintained in both the piano and orchestral versions would have been played on bagpipes. 

The first piece, Jocul cu bâtǎ, is a “game with sticks” boasting an energetic syncopated tune. The following Brâul (Sash Dance) is a fast-paced number traceable to a region that was previously a part of Yugoslavia. The third Pe loc (On the Spot) is a “stamping” dance where, in the folk originals, the dances stamp (or stomp) in place without moving from one spot. The fourth number, Buciumeana, is a graceful hornpipe dance in 3/4 time that provides contrast in its haunting mood. A Romanian children’s polka (Poargǎ româneascǎ) serves as the fifth number, enlivened by a jaunty beat. The concluding two-part Măruntel is yet another quick dance and brings the work to a lively close. 

Steven Lowe © 2013, revised 2025 

RAYMOND YIU
Violin Concerto 
BORN: 1973, in Hong Kong, China 
WORK COMPOSED: 2018–2024 
WORLD PREMIERE: March 20, 2024, at London’s Barbican Centre, with Clemens Schuldt conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra and featured soloist Esther Yoo. 

What to Listen For:  

• In the third movement, unaccompanied by the orchestra, the soloist performs a piece originally written for erhu (a Chinese bowed instrument with two strings); Yiu transcribed it from a field recording made in Hong Kong in 1974, the year after his own birth there. It alludes to the concerto’s themes of exile, loss and nostalgia. 

Composed specially for Esther Yoo, Raymond Yiu’s Violin Concerto is inspired by the life of the great Chinese violinist Ma Sicong. Born in 1912, Ma spent much of his teens in France, studying violin and then composition, then made a highly successful career in China. Initially feted by the new Communist regime after 1949, his fortunes turned abruptly in the wake of the 1966 Cultural Revolution; he was targeted by Mao Zedong’s Red Guards under the newly anti-elitist dispensation, and in early 1967, escaped with his family to the USA, where he died in 1987. The folksong-based second movement, Nostalgia, from Ma’s Inner Mongolia Suite (1937), is well known to Chinese listeners even today, and echoes of it are threaded throughout Yiu’s concerto, which is itself a meditation on the sorrows of exile and a homage to a life broken by political persecution. 

The first movement emerges from violin trills, out of and around which gradually form harmonies, melodic shapes, and isolated ideas — a rhythmic figure on snare drum, a pattern of repeated orchestral chords under a sustained violin line — that seem like premonitions of what is to come later in the work. 

Following without a break, the second movement begins as a light-footed scherzo before relaxing into a trio section that pays homage to shidaiqu — a genre of popular music that Ma would have known well in his youth. This sensual, jazz- and Latin American-influenced style was widespread in China during the 1930s and 1940s, but as the newly founded People’s Republic turned against the commercial entertainment industry, it was banished from the mainland, finding refuge in non-Communist Hong Kong and Taiwan. After a return to the scherzo material, the shidaiqu music resurfaces, but this time layered with and eventually almost lost under a jumble of competing sounds and moods. 

The soloist plays almost continuously through the first two movements but in constant dialogue with the orchestra. In the third movement, she turns inward. Playing entirely unaccompanied, with the silent orchestra around her only emphasizing her solitude, she performs a decorated transcription of a solo piece for erhu (a Chinese bowed instrument with two strings), which Yiu found on a field recording made in Hong Kong in 1974, the year after his own birth there. Even more personal in its connotations to Yiu than the Ma Sicong-based material of the other movements, this music offers a different perspective on the concerto’s concerns with exile, loss and nostalgia. 

In a reversal of concerto convention, the final movement is the most substantial and the most formally intricate. But in general, the movement draws on concerto tradition rather than contesting it. The soloist floats a long-breathed lyrical melody over string tremolandi and low clarinets — a clear allusion to the opening of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, even if the pitches of the melody are derived from Ma’s Nostalgia. Also grounded in concerto tradition is the way in which the relationship between soloist and orchestra changes and evolves in the course of the movement. Around the mid-point, that relationship becomes notably antagonistic, with the orchestra’s music increasingly dense and changeable, and the soloist struggling to hold her own — as if to evoke the way entirely external factors can radically alter the fate of an individual under an oppressive political regime. After a fierce climax and a rhapsodic cadenza, the piece comes to rest in a quiet contrapuntal synthesis of all its themes. 

John Fallas © 2024 


ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK  
Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95, “From the New World” 
BORN: September 8, 1841, in Nelahozeves, Bohemia 
DIED: May 1, 1904, in Prague 
WORK COMPOSED: 1893 
WORLD PREMIERE: December 16, 1893, at Carnegie Hall in New York. The New York Philharmonic Orchestra was conducted by Dvořák’s friend Anton Seidl. 

What to Listen For:   

• This symphony includes one of the most famous melodies in the orchestral literature: the song-like theme played by English horn near the start of the second movement. That melody and others from each of the symphony’s first three movements recur in the finale, providing a cogent summation of the main ideas of this large-scale work. 

This symphony includes one of the most famous melodies in the orchestral literature: the song-like theme played by English horn near the start of the second movement. That melody and others from each of the symphony’s first three movements recur in the finale, providing a cogent summation of the main ideas of this large-scale work. 

Antonín Dvořák was born in Bohemia, the country we now know as the Czech Republic, and during the 1870s rose to prominence as his homeland’s foremost composer. In the years that followed, his fame spread throughout Europe and even across the Atlantic, where it attracted the notice of a Mrs. Jeanette Thurber, who had established a new conservatory of music in New York. In 1891, she invited Dvořák to become the director of this school. He would be well compensated and his duties light, leaving plenty of time for composing. After some negotiating, Dvořák accepted the position and, in September 1892, sailed for America. For much of 1892 through 1895, the composer lived in New York and in Iowa, where he spent a summer in a community of Czech emigrant farmers.  

It was during his first year in America that Dvořák composed his Symphony No. 9, which bears the subtitle “From the New World.” Dvořák declared that he intended that moniker to mean “Impressions and greetings from the New World.” This is far from the musical panorama of America and American life some commentators have heard in the piece. Moreover, the form and developmental procedures at work in this composition are very much within the mainstream of European symphonic tradition. Still, Dvořák stated that the work’s American provenance would be obvious “to anyone who ‘had a nose’,” and he told a correspondent, “I do know that I would never have written [it] ‘just so’ had I never seen America.”  

This uncertainty about just how American the symphony really is extends to its thematic material. On more than one occasion during his American sojourn, Dvořák expressed interest in African American spirituals and native American tribal music, and he once alluded to the “peculiarities of Negro and Indian music” (the terms used at the time he was writing) in the themes of this symphony. But, as he also emphasized, there are no actual quotations of any American music in the “New World” Symphony. Moreover, some of the “peculiarities” of its melodies are also those of Czech folk songs.  

And so we return to Dvořák’s title, which offers what is no doubt the most helpful perspective on the question of the symphony’s nationality: that it was written by a Czech musician under the influence of his experience of life in the United States. To be sure, the symphony’s form, orchestration and much of its character are typically Central European. Yet Americans can be proud that this composition was born on their soil, and that certain aspects of American legend, literature and folk song undoubtedly influenced it in ways we cannot precisely define, yet nevertheless strongly intuit from its music. 

Dvořák precedes the first movement with an introduction in slow tempo. In the first movement proper, the main theme is a robust idea given out by horns and woodwinds. The second movement features one of the composer’s most famous creations, a deeply poignant melody sung by English horn. But the beauty of that theme should not distract us from the strange power of the brass chords that frame the movement, nor from the melting poignancy of the second subject. That later idea presents melancholy phrases in the woodwinds against tremolo figures in the strings that sound like wind rustling through tree branches in a bleak winter sky. We also hear a recollection of material from earlier in the symphony and a quietly dramatic faltering of the music near the close.  

The ensuing scherzo balances fierce energy with a relaxed and folkloric central episode. This third movement also recalls themes from the opening part of the composition, and Dvořák extends this idea to the finale. Here recollections from each of the preceding movements provide, in the concluding minutes of the symphony, a comprehensive and exciting conclusion. 

Paul Schaivo © 2019, revised 2025