In his Ninth Symphony, Dvořák aimed to create musical portraits of his time in America — weaving a vibrant tapestry of Black spirituals and Indigenous folk songs with tunes from his native Bohemia. And things go bump in the night in Wagner's ghostly overture to The Flying Dutchman and Liszt's Totentanz, a captivating work based on macabre melodies from the medieval Mass for the Dead.
Wagner: Overture to The Flying Dutchman
Liszt: Totentanz (Dance of the Dead)
Dvořák: Symphony No. 9 “From the New World”
Asher Fisch, Conductor
Joyce Yang, Piano
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Written as Stalin's Great Terror campaign made music a matter of life and death for Soviet composers, Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony is a searing search for hope in a time of darkness and oppression. Fear and vulnerability also hover over Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto, its hushed laments and demonic dissonances mirroring the composer's anguish upon his imminent return to the Soviet Union.
Makoto Ozone delivers his "thrilling, unabashedly personal rendition" (New York Times) of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue — a jazzy, kaleidoscopic tribute to the kinetic energy of America's cities in the 1920s. And composed the same year as the Gershwin, Bartók's Miraculous Mandarin channels the turmoil of post–World War I Europe in a scandalous tale of sex, violence, and the supernatural.
