NWS celebrates 10 years of WALLCAST® concerts with this Encore series featuring performance highlights from NWS’s previous seasons. NWS originally performed this concert on November 15, 2019.  

Carlos Miguel Prieto, Musical America’s 2019 Conductor of the Year, makes his NWS debut with music of unabashed emotion and nostalgia. As an emigrant, Antonín Dvořák embraced the sounds of his new American home, adopting our country’s rich musical traditions to create one of the most famous symphonies of all time. Gabriela Ortiz celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Constitution of Mexico in her Hominum. Samuel Barber clings to the sun-dappled days of his childhood with this lyric ode brought to life by soprano Michelle Bradley.    

This is a Premier Encore WALLCAST® Concert, available for current subscribers at the Vivace and Allegro levels. Subscribers will receive an RSVP email on April 28 and must RSVP no later than May 5 at 5pm. Package limits apply to Allegro subscribers. Single tickets, if available, will go on sale beginning May 5 at 5:00 PM. Click here to become an NWS subscriber.

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Mobile Program: Text WALLCAST to 50155 and receive a link to the mobile program.

Event Safety Protocols 

The May 15 Premier Encore WALLCAST® Concert is a seated event in SoundScape Park. NWS will provide all ticketholders with a chair in a designated seating area that is socially distanced from others. Seating opens at 6:00 PM. Please arrive with your complete party to guarantee seating together.

Masks are required unless when actively eating or drinking, or when in your designated seating area. Blankets, food and drink are allowed. Tables, carts and other large items are prohibited in the seating area.

Restrooms are available in the south-east corner of SoundScape Park. The New World Center will be closed.

Program

Gabriela Ortiz

Hominum: Suite for Orchestra (2016)
Approximate duration: 21 minutes

During her childhood in Mexico, Gabriela Ortiz was surrounded by folk music, with both of her parents participating in a groundbreaking amateur ensemble that worked to preserve Latin American traditions. Her education took her from Mexico City to Paris and London, and commissions from around the globe for her orchestral works, chamber music, dance scores and operas have made Ortiz a leader among Mexican composers today.

A commission from the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de México, timed to honor the 2017 centenary of the Mexican Revolution, led Ortiz to write Hominum, a concerto for orchestra. She then worked with conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto to create the shorter Suite heard here. The four movements “allude to the mysterious associations and creative manifestations of music through a series of characteristics that represent our existence as a society,” wrote Ortiz’s colleague Alejandro Escuer in the program note printed for the Suite’s world premiere in Liverpool. His note also fleshed out the meaning behind the titles of each movement:

Black marks the beginning of our primitive, archaic, primeval coexistence among dark rituals, habits and customs ruled by instinct, elements and the chaos that prevents humankind from looking out for the common good. Light, on the other hand, represents the world of ideas, laws, concepts tailored to a social coexistence founded on principles that, first and foremost, prioritize organization and order.

In Water describes the equilibrium between the needs of the individual and society at large, the reconciliation of both sides of humanity; two spheres that, floating in suspension, levitate to enable the generation of creativity, transformation and fulfillment. Finally, Red represents our strength upon confronting different manifestations of injustice; it is the emotional product of chaos caused by a lack of equilibrium, impunity and the corruption of ideas and matter; it is the indignation and struggle against all that which keeps us as a society from living together in harmony.

Samuel Barber

Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Op. 24 (1947)
Approximate duration: 16 minutes

Samuel Barber had a strong family connection to the world of vocal music: His uncle was Sidney Homer, a composer known for art songs, and his aunt was Louise Homer, a star contralto at The Metropolitan Opera. Barber began writing songs at the age of seven, and his output eventually included two grand operas. His most enduring vocal work has proven to be Knoxville: Summer of 1915, an orchestral setting of a prose poem by James Agee. Written in the wake of World War II, at a time when Barber’s own father was dying, the score strikes a musical posture perfectly aligned with Agee’s intimate and nostalgic look back at an easier, simpler time.

Agee and Barber were born within a few months of each other, and the description of Agee’s childhood in Tennessee resonated deeply with Barber and his own experiences at the same age in a Philadelphia suburb. Writing to his uncle Sidney, Barber said of the text, “It reminded me so much of summer evenings in West Chester, now very far away, and all of you are in it.”

That sweet, balmy scene comes alive in music that sways with the easy lilt of a rocking chair, and the smooth vocal phrases built from pentatonic modes (as often found in folk music) enhance the homespun intimacy.

Antonín Dvořák

Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95, “From the New World” (1893)
Approximate duration: 40 minutes

Antonín Dvořák came from a small Bohemian village, where his zither-playing father was the local butcher and innkeeper. Dvořák’s first big hit was a set of Slavonic Dances that drew upon Czech folk music, and even a steady stream of masterful symphonies and chamber music scores in the Beethoven-Brahms tradition hardly dispelled the notion that he was a provincial composer. While his embrace of that local cultural identity cost him credibility within the German-speaking world, he found appreciative audiences further afield. In the 1880s, a series of visits to London made him a local hero, and in the next decade he made an even bigger impact in the New World.

The job that lured Dvořák away from his beloved Czech homeland was an offer to direct the National Conservatory in New York. When he accepted in 1892, he understood that his position involved more than running a music school. He wrote to a friend, “The Americans expect great things of me. I am to show them the way into the Promised Land, the realm of a new, independent art, in short a national style of music!”

Besides teaching American composers and supporting them in their efforts to bring local inspiration into their music, Dvořák infused his own compositions from that period with sounds borrowed from Native American and African-American traditions—the sources he latched onto as quintessentially “American.” His understanding of Indian culture was indirect, gleaned from his reading of Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and from melodies that appeared in heavily edited songbooks published by Eurocentric scholars. Dvořák did have the benefit of more direct contact with African American music through a student at the conservatory, Harry Burleigh, a singer and composer who had learned spirituals from his grandfather, a freed slave.

Dvořák noted essential similarities between Native American and African American music, qualities he recognized in Scottish tunes as well. The shared trait among those styles and many other global folk traditions was the use of the pentatonic mode, as opposed to the major and minor scales of European art music. (An easy way to hear the contrast is on a piano; the black keys form a pentatonic mode, while the white keys form a major scale.)

Dvořák let those folk influences filter through the Symphony that he composed in New York in time for a debut at Carnegie Hall on December 16, 1893, performed by the New York Philharmonic and conductor Anton Seidl. Dvořák numbered the Symphony as his fifth, having disavowed several early works, but it was actually his ninth and final symphony, and modern practice reflects that numbering. The subtitle, “From the New World,” was Dvořák’s own.

In the Symphony’s first movement, a leaping motive sounded by the horns at the start of the Allegro molto section becomes a building block for adventurous exploration that owes more to Brahms and Beethoven than American folk music. A secondary theme set in a major key, first heard in the flute, introduces a pastoral contrast.

The Largo second movement reflects the spirituals that Dvořák learned from his African American student, and it provides the English horn with its most endearing solo passage in the orchestral repertoire. Later, with the addition of lyrics by William Arms Fisher, this melody became “Goin’ Home,” and the fact that it is frequently mistaken for an authentic spiritual proves how well Dvořák synthesized his source material.

The third movement fulfills the traditional function of a symphonic scherzo in the mold of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, while also tying the work together with quotations from the two preceding movements. According to Dvořák, a wedding scene from The Song of Hiawatha served as inspiration for this festive music.

The finale, like the opening movement, blends European-leaning themes and techniques with glints of modal material, including flashbacks to some of the Symphony’s earlier highlights. As the Czech composer duly acknowledged, “I should never have written the symphony ‘just so’ if I hadn’t seen America.”

— Copyright © 2019 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer, guitarist and writer based in Seattle. Besides providing program notes for the New World Symphony, he has been the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s program annotator since 2005 and also contributes notes to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Seattle Symphony.