Dita KRENBERGA – flute
Anete TOČA
Guntis KUZMA
Artūrs ŠULCS
Conductor Andris VECUMNIEKS
Programme:
Zoltán KODÁLY – “Dances of Galánta”,
Pēteris PLAKIDIS – Concerto for a group of soloists and orchestra “Calling to One Another”,
Antonín Dvořák Symphony No. 9 “From the New World” in E minor, Op. 95.
A programme with the brisk vigour of spring and ethnic motifs running through its symphonic scores – proof that music is essentially one and the same, whether it wears a kilt or white tie.
Zoltán Kodály embodied the very core of the Hungarian soul, something the richly ornamented “Dances of Galánta” illustrate to perfection. Pēteris Plakidis, Greek and Latvian at once, drew his “Calling to One Another” in unmistakably Latvian contours, with birdsong and shepherds’ calls.
The programme is crowned by one of the great hits of classical music – Dvořák’s Symphony “From the New World”, in which the composer openly shows how completely he had fallen under the spell of African American and Native American music.
The erudite and internationally acclaimed Hungarian composer and folklore scholar Zoltán Kodály wove art music and folk music tightly together in his own work. Together with Béla Bartók, Kodály prepared for publication the collection Corpus Musicae Popularis, Hungaricae – 3,700 melodies in 10 volumes, issued between 1951 and 1997.
In 1928 Béla Bartók wrote of Kodály: “If one must name a composer who truly embodies the Hungarian spirit, it is Kodály. His achievement is proof of his faith in that Hungarian spirit. All of Kodály’s work is rooted in Hungarian soil, yet his firmest foundation of all is his unshakable faith and trust in the creative spirit and the future of his people.”
“Dances of Galánta” are Kodály’s ardently surging, brightly nostalgic memories of one of the small towns where he spent his childhood. Until the end of the First World War Galánta belonged to Austria-Hungary; it then became part of the newly founded Czechoslovakia, and today it is a Slovak town. For a time Kodály’s father was the stationmaster at Galánta.
Pēteris Plakidis is a composer with a crystal-clear sense of what needs to be done. He likes to play, to stylise, to conceal, to tease with affection. Elsewhere his scores are sharply chiselled, laconic, precise, unsparing, achingly virile. An outstanding accompanist with a broad knowledge of music history. An aristocrat of the art of music. Perhaps one of the last in Latvia.
Pēteris Plakidis’s “Calling to One Another” is a tribute felt to the marrow to that elusive quality we describe as ‘the Latvian element in music’. Not in a national-romantic sense, but in a contemporary symphonic language, at once simple and finely wrought, with echoes of birdsong and ethnographically exact shepherds’ cries. In his book “The Music of the Young, Twenty Years On”, Guntars Pupa writes: “The reaction stirred in us by the calling to one another of the solo instruments – piccolo, flute, oboe, bass clarinet, horn – and the orchestra invites comparison with a ‘bombardment’ of living, vibrating charges of spiritual energy. The fact that the orchestra plays on stage while the soloists are in the foyer and on the balcony turns otherwise passive, detached listeners into active participants in this calling to one another, and everyone feels drawn into what is almost a magical ritual.”
Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony “From the New World” really was composed in America, during the years when Dvořák was director of the National Conservatory in New York. In the three years he spent in the United States he became acquainted with African American and Native American melodies, which proved a powerful creative inspiration. Of the spirituals Dvořák said: “I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called the ‘Negro melodies’. They must become the only real foundation for any serious and original school of composition that might develop in the United States. (..) In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music. They are pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, bold, merry, gay – whatever you like! It is music that suits any purpose or mood. There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot be enriched with themes drawn from this source.”
Dvořák worked on the Symphony “From the New World” for six months, completing it on 24 May 1893. The premiere took place at Carnegie Hall in New York on 16 December 1893, and its success was overwhelming. Dvořák recalled: “The papers reported that no composer had ever known such a triumph. The audience applauded so long that I had to thank them like a king!”
In writing the symphony Dvořák drew not only on musical sources but also on “The Song of Hiawatha” by Henry W. Longfellow, then an immensely popular American poet, which he had come to know even before he arrived in America. The symphony’s most famous theme is the cor anglais solo of the second movement, a scene for which, Dvořák said, he had before his eyes the burial of Hiawatha’s wife Minnehaha. It is deep winter and famine reigns; Minnehaha dies of cold, hunger and fever, and, wrapped in white ermine, she is laid to rest “in the forest, deep and darksome, underneath the moaning hemlocks”. The third movement, in turn, is a scherzo depicting, in Dvořák’s words, “a feast at which the Indians dance in the forest”.
Andris Vecumnieks is a composer, conductor, lecturer and teacher. Head of the symphony orchestra class at the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music and, since 2005, associate professor there. He is artistic director of the chamber orchestra Sinfonia concertante and heads the LNSO children’s concert series in collaboration with LeNeSOns. He conducts the symphony orchestra of the Emīls Dārziņš Music School.