2014 Blossom Music Festival August 16

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BLOSSOM MUSIC FESTIVAL S

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saturday August 16

YO-YO MA The Cleveland Orchestra Jahja Ling, conductor Yo-Yo Ma, cello

Jahja Ling The upcoming 2014-15 season marks Jahja Ling’s eleventh year as music director of the San Diego Symphony. He also maintains a career as an internationally renowned guest conductor. In addition, he holds a long, collaborative relationship with The Cleveland Orchestra, where he was a member of the conducting staff from 1984 to 2005. Mr. Ling was resident conductor of the Orchestra (1985-2002) and served as Blossom Festival Director for six seasons (2000-05). He has returned each year as a guest conductor; this summer’s concerts mark the 30th anniversary of his first conducting The Cleveland Orchestra.

Mr. Ling has conducted all of the major symphony orchestras of North America and many prominent ensembles across Europe and Asia. Acclaimed for his interpretation of works in the standard repertoire, he is also recognized for the breadth of contemporary music included in his programs. Recent and upcoming appearances include performances with the San Diego Symphony at Carnegie Hall and on tour in China, plus guest conducting engagements with orchestras in Asia, North America, and Europe.

Jahja Ling’s commitment to working with and developing young musicians is evidenced by his involvement as founding music director of the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra (1986-93) and the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra (1981-84).

Mr. Ling’s recordings include a range of works on the Telarc, Azica Records, and Continuum labels, featuring performances with the San Diego Symphony, Florida Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, one of which was nominated for a Grammy Award. His performance of the world premiere of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s Third Symphony with the New York Philharmonic is included in that ensemble’s American Celebrations collection.

Born in Jakarta, Indonesia, of Chinese descent, Jahja Ling began to play the piano at age 4 and studied at the Jakarta School of Music. At age 17, he won the Jakarta Piano Competition and was awarded a Rockefeller grant to attend the Juilliard School. He continued his education at Yale, studying orchestra conducting under Otto-Werner Mueller and earning both a master’s degree and doctorate. He also served as a conducting fellow at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute. In addition to his years with The Cleveland Orchestra, and as a member of the conducting staff of the San Francisco Symphony, Mr. Ling served as music director of the Florida Orchestra (1988-2003) and was artistic director of the National Symphony Orchestra of Taipei (1998-2001). As a pianist, he won a bronze medal at the 1977 Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition.

Mr. Ling makes his home in San Diego with his wife, Jessie, and their young daughters, Priscilla and Stephanie.

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Conductor

2014 Blossom Festival

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BLOSSOM MUSIC FESTIVAL

Saturday evening, August 16, 2014, at 8:00 p.m.

THE CLEVEL AND ORCHESTRA JA H JA L I N G , conductor

BEDRICH SMETANA

Overture to The Bartered Bride

EDWARD ELGAR

Cello Concerto in E minor, Opus 85

(1824-1884)

(1857-1934)

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Adagio — Moderato Lento — Allegro molto Adagio Allegro — Moderato — Allegro, ma non troppo — Poco più lento — Adagio

YO-YO MA, cello

INTERMISSION ANTONÍN DVORÁK (1841-1904)

Symphony No. 6 in D major, Opus 60 1.

2.

3.

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Allegro non tanto Adagio Scherzo (Furiant): Presto — Trio Finale: Allegro con spirito

This concert is dedicated to Mrs. Alfred M. Rankin, Sr. and to William P. Blair III in recognition of their extraordinary generosity in support of The Cleveland Orchestra’s 2013-14 Annual Fund.

Media Partners: WCLV Classical 104.9 FM ideastream® and The Plain Dealer

Blossom Music Festival

Program: August 16

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Overture to The Bartered Bride from the opera composed 1863-66

is today honored as the founding father of Czech music. His determined efforts on behalf of a national sound and repertory, however, were only partially understood and accepted in his own lifetime. The musical creativity he deployed was as often dismissed as celebrated. His good intentions were frequently misjudged by others or only incompletely accomplished by his own understanding of music’s rights and wrongs. Yet his fame endures — just as the country he so ardently believed in has at last become post-modern reality.

Like his contemporaries Verdi and Wagner, Smetana devoted a majority of his creative energies to writing opera. Like them, too, he was pioneering the art form both as music and as an expression of his country’s nationhood.

As a musician, Smetana was partially self-taught. His father was an amateur violinist and encouraged musical leisure in all his children (Bedřich was the thirteenth of 20 children born to three successive wives; typical of the era, only 9 children survived infancy). Young Bedřich showed a remarkable ear for music and quickly learned to play both violin and piano. He performed in public at age six and might well have been another Mozart-like child star had his father been more willing to promote his son’s gifts for profit.

Bedřich’s musical learning, however, was neither systematic nor rigorous. His fast ear gave him early facility, but provided very little foundation for theory and formal understanding.

His sometimes incurious interest in academics also limited his horizons, and he was constantly distracted by everyday life.

Like many creative geniuses required by necessity to find their voice by trial and error in full view (hearing) of the public, Smetana was accused of writing music that sounded like almost every other northern European 19th-century composer you can name, from Wagner to Berlioz, from Weber to Schumann to Liszt, Rossini and Donizetti. And some of his music is remarkably reminiscent of those, and others. Even though it finally has been recognized to sound like himself.

Smetana was, at least at first, a pragmatic nationalist, probably more interested in good music and good theatrics than in politics itself. He is today revered as a rallying symbol of Czech nationalism. But his style came slowly, bit by occasionally pain-

B E D Ř I C H S M E TA N A

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Bedřich

SMETANA born March 2, 1824 Litomyšl, Bohemia died May 12, 1884 Prague

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About the Music

The Cleveland Orchestra

ful bit. And at times quite unsuccessfully. Luckily for him, he forged together a characteristic Czech sound at precisely the time that the country itself was forming politically. Bohemia, after centuries of German subjugation, was caught up in the patriotic fever that swept much of Europe in the 19th century. Over the centuries, the region had been “adopted” and traded among the grand Germanic nationstates of central Europe. And although the two cultures had intertwined themselves quite thoroughly in most aspects of day-to-day life, many of the region’s citizens nevertheless identified strongly with a Czech “homeland.”

After a number of years, abroad in Sweden and then advocating a new tradition of Czech music from the outside as newspaper critic and conductor-performer, he was at last made chief administrator of the city’s Provincial Theater (Prozatímní in Czech, literally meaning “Provisional,” and representing an expedient test case by the Germanic government to allow and promote, in a limited way, Czech opera performance). It was at first a second-class operation compared to the German productions (and orchestra) across town, but it was exactly the platform Smetana needed.

Throughout his years as principal conductor of the Provincial Czech Theater (1866-74), Smetana’s efforts to foster a uniquely Czech musical language were largely devoted to the creation and production of operas — his own as well as some attempts by others or suitable repertory favorites outfitted with new Czech translation. At the time, there were very few precedents for what Czech symphonic or “classical” music should be.

Smetana’s first great success came with his second opera, The Bartered Bride, which opportunely premiered in 1866 near the crest of a wave of nationalistic fervor across Bohemia. The overture is a mood-setting piece of great excitement and fun.

Like many notable overtures of an earlier era, it contains only a few whifs of melodic ideas that actually appear in the opera, although some of its impulse comes from the closing section of Act Two. —Eric Sellen © 2014

At a Glance Smetana wrote his opera Prodaná nevěstra [“The Bartered Bride”] to a German libretto by Karel Sabina (for which the composer helped to fashion a Czech version) between 1863 and 1866.

The first performance took place in Prague on May 30, 1866, with the composer conducting. Smetana made some revisions and additions to the score over the next three years.

This overture runs just over 5 minutes in performance. Smetana scored the opera for 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, percussion (triangle, cymbals, bass drum, tenor drum) and strings.

The Blossom Board of Overseers is proud to welcome state legislators to this evening’s concert in appreciation for their support and advocacy.

Blossom Music Festival

About the Music

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Cello Concerto in E minor, Opus 85 composed 1918-19

of his seventy-six years did Elgar enjoy the simultaneous benefits of fame and creative abundance. For the first forty-two years, he was unknown in the wider world, and for the last fourteen his muse was in retirement, if not quite still. The work that closed this twenty-year period of high creativity was the Cello Concerto, completed in the summer of 1919. A year later, with the death of his beloved wife, Alice, Elgar withdrew more and more from public life and wrote no more masterpieces.

His slow progress toward national recognition was no doubt due to the fact that he grew up far from London and did not study with someone who could have helped him on his way. He was largely self-taught, and did not at all match English people’s notion of a typical composer — expected in those days to be someone who clearly recognized and understood the beauty of art, and could talk about it, in the manner of Oscar Wilde, or at least a foreigner. A friend who had played under Elgar’s direction described him as “a very distinguished-looking English country gentleman, tall, with a large and somewhat aggressive moustache, a prominent but shapely nose and rather deep-set but piercing eyes. It was his eyes perhaps that gave the clue to his real personality: they sparkled with humour, or became grave or gay, bright or misty as each mood in the music revealed itself.

He looked upstanding, and had an almost military bearing. He was practical to a degree, he wasted no time. The orchestra, it is almost needless to say, adored him.”

Until the success of his Enigma Variations in London in 1899, Elgar was regarded as a provincial composer, which indeed he was, composing mostly for the regional festivals that flourished across the countrysides in late Victorian England. Then the great works appeared in steady succession — the Dream of Gerontius, Sea Pictures, the Pomp and Circumstance marches, In the South, the Introduction and Allegro for strings, the First Symphony, the Violin Concerto, the Second Symphony, Falstaff, and a group of three chamber works composed toward the end of the war: the Violin Sonata, the String Quartet, and the Piano Quintet.

These last three works were composed at Brinkwells, the house in Sussex where the Elgars moved in 1917. It was odd that

O N LY F O R T W E N T Y

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Edward

ELGAR born June 2, 1857 Broadheath, England died February 23, 1934 Worcester, England

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About the Music

The Cleveland Orchestra

Elgar should live anywhere but in his beloved West Country, but this house brought him respite from the constant anxieties of World War I, and is readily associated with the leaner, more reflective musical style that the Cello Concerto perfectly illustrates. A letter written at this time describes his routine: “I rise about seven work till 8-15 — then dress, breakfast — pipe (I smoke again all day!) work till 12-30 lunch (pipe) — rest an hour — work till tea (pipe) — then work till 7-30 — change, dinner at 8. Bed at 10 — every day practically goes thus . . . We go for lovely walks . . . the woods are full of flowers, wonderful . . .”

On September 26, 1918, with the war still on, Elgar’s wife’s diary recorded “wonderful new music, real wood sounds & other lament wh. shd. be in a war symphony.” But this was to be a concerto, not a symphony, and as it neared completion the following summer, Elgar described it as “a real large work & I think good & alive.” The Cello Concerto was completed in July 1919 and first performed in the Queen’s Hall, London, on October 26 of that year with Felix Salmond as the soloist and Elgar himself conducting. (In the cello section of the orchestra — the London Symphony Orchestra — was a future conductor, John Barbirolli, then aged nineteen, who was later to conduct a historic recording of the work with Jacqueline du Pré.) For that first night, Elgar had been given too little rehearsal time, and the main impression was of orchestral incompetence. Ernest Newman reported that the orchestra “made a lamentable public exhibition of itself.” Later the work came to be recognized as one of the handful of supreme concertos for cello. In 1928, Elgar conducted a recording of the work with Beatrice Harrison as the soloist.

THE MUSIC

We may discern in the Cello Concerto a sentiment of resignation and even of despair generated from within by that strong vein of melancholy that had always been an inescapable element of Elgar’s music, and from without by the desolating impact of the Great War. But the Cello Concerto is not a threnody, nor even, so far as we can tell, a deliberately planned swansong. It is reflective, playful, tearful, and energetic by turns, like all his best music, and we underestimate the work if we attach too much to its autumnal character — many of its pages might have been summoned into existence as part of Elgar’s Wand of Youth.

Unlike the traditional concerto, this one has four moveBlossom Music Festival

About the Music

The work that closed Elgar’s great twentyyear period of high creativity was the Cello Concerto, completed in the summer of 1919. A year later, with the death of his beloved wife Alice, the composer withdrew more and more from public life and wrote no more masterpieces.

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At a Glance Elgar wrote his Cello Concerto between Sepetmber 1918 and June 1919. The first performance took place in London on October 26, 1919, with the composer conducting and Felix Salmond as the soloist. (Salmond later moved to the United States, and taught at Juilliard and then at Curtis; his pupils included Bernard Greenhouse and Leonard Rose.)

This concerto runs about 30 minutes in performance.

Elgar scored it for 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings.

The Cleveland Orchestra first presented Elgar’s Cello Concerto at a weekend of concerts in February 1967 under Louis Lane’s direction, with Jacqueline Du Pré as soloist. It was most recently performed as part of the 2004 Blossom Music Festival, conducted by David Zinman and with Claudio Bohórquez as the soloist.

ments, not three. Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto had expanded the form to four movements and taken on mighty symphonic proportions, but Elgar here has four movements not for length and weight but for diversity and contrast. The movements are all concise, especially when compared to the expansive landscape of the three movements in Elgar’s Violin Concerto. As in his two symphonies, the two central movements, a scherzo and a slow movement, offer a complete contrast in momentum and temper. The declamatory opening of the work recurs truncated at the beginning of the scherzo and in full, this time with marvelously valedictory effect, at the end of the finale.

After a declamatory opening for the soloist, the fi rst movement’s gentle lilt is far removed from any pomp or circumstance. Over the meandering first theme Elgar wrote in his sketchbook: “very full, sweet and sonorous,” and although the whole orchestra tries to give it breadth, it ends as it began, bleak and bare. The scherzo second movement that follows is in 4/4 time with bustling sixteenths reminiscent of Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for strings of many years earlier. There is a brief expressive phrase offered here and there in contrast, but lightness prevails.

For the work’s slow movement, Elgar indulges unashamedly in the yearning phrases and sliding harmony that breathe nostalgia and tranquility. This is not a lament but a private world of sweetness so direct and complete that it requires no development or expansion. For all its heart-rending beauty, the movement is short, and its half-close leads directly into the finale fourth movement. Here, after another declamatory start, the music settles into a sturdy rhythm that proceeds in a businesslike and oddly impersonal fashion right through to the closing pages. Then, as if yielding to some fatal destiny, Elgar adds an epilogue in slow tempo as passionate as anything he had ever written, full of drooping phrases and desperate gestures, like a dying man reaching up for help. There is asperity too, in the harmony, and the music slides inevitably into a brief memory of the slow movement followed by the work’s opening statement and a brief energetic (and surely ironic in intention) close.

—Hugh Macdonald © 2014 Hugh Macdonald lives in England and is the Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis.

He s a noted authority on French music. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, and Scriabin.

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About the Music

Blossom Music Festival

Yo-Yo Ma C E L L I S T Y O -Y O M A ’s multi-faceted career is testament to his continual search for new ways to communicate with audiences, and to his personal desire for artistic growth and renewal. Whether performing new or familiar works from the cello repertoire, coming together with colleagues for chamber music, or exploring cultures and musical forms outside the Western classical tradition, Mr. Ma strives to find connections that stimulate the imagination.

Yo-Yo Ma made his Cleveland Orchestra debut in January 1982, performing the Dvořák Cello Concerto in concert at Severance Hall. He returned frequently over the next decade, including concerto and recital performances at Severance Hall, as well as concertos at Blossom. Most recently, he led a Blossom Festival performance of his Silk Road Ensemble in August 2010, and returned in November 2012 to perform at The Cleveland Orchestra’s annual Gala Concert.

Mr. Ma maintains a balance between his engagements as soloist with orchestras throughout the world, his recital and chamber music activities, and his work with the Silk Road Project, for which he serves as artistic director. He draws inspiration from a wide circle of collaborators, each fueled by the artists’ interactions.

One of Mr. Ma’s goals is the exploration of music as a means of communication and as a vehicle for the migrations of ideas across a range of cultures throughout the world. Expanding upon this interest, in 1998, Mr. Ma established the Silk Road Project, a nonprofit arts and educational organization. Under his artistic direction, the Silk Road Project presents performances by the acclaimed Silk Road Ensemble, engages in cross-cultural exchanges and residencies, leads workshops for students, and partners with leading cultural institutions to create educational materials and programs.

The Project’s ongoing affiliation with Harvard University has made it possible to broaden and enhance educational programming. Through ongoing partnerships with arts and educational organizations in New York City, it continues to expand Silk Road Connect, a multidisciplinary educational initiative for middleschool students in the city’s public schools. Developing new music is also a central undertaking of the Silk Road Project, which has been involved in commissioning and performing more than 60 new musical and multimedia works from composers and arrangers around the world.

Mr. Ma is widely recognized for his strong commitment to educational programs that bring the world into the classroom and the classroom into the world.

While touring, he takes time whenever possible to conduct masterclasses as well as more informal programs for students — musicians and non-musicians alike. He

Blossom Music Festival

Soloist

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has also reached young audiences through appearances on Arthur, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and Sesame Street. Along these lines, Yo-Yo Ma is currently working as an ongoing creative consultant with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the ensemble’s Institute for Learning, Access, and Training. This work focuses on the transformative power music can have in individuals’ lives, and on increasing the number and variety of opportunities audiences have to experience music in their communities. Mr. Ma and the Institute have created the Citizen Musician Initiative, a movement that calls on all musicians, music lovers, music teachers, and institutions to use the art form to bridge gulfs between people and to create and inspire a sense of community, detailed at www.citizenmusician.org.

Mr. Ma is an exclusive Sony Classical artist, and his discography of over 90 albums (including more than 15 Grammy Award winners) reflects his wideranging interests. He has made several successful recordings that defy easy categorization, among them Hush with Bobby McFerrin, Appalachia Waltz and Appalachian Journey with Mark O’Connor and Edgar Meyer, and three albums with the Silk Road Ensemble. Mr. Ma’s recent recordings include Mendelssohn Trios with Emanuel Ax and Itzhak Perlman. Across this full range of releases, Mr. Ma remains one of the best-selling recording artists in the classical field. In autumn 2009, Sony Classical released a box set of over 90 albums to commemorate Mr. Ma’s 30 years as a Sony recording artist.

Yo-Yo Ma was born in 1955 to Chinese parents living in Paris. He began to study the cello with his father at age four and soon came with his family to New York, where he spent most of his formative years. Later, his principal teacher was Leonard Rose at the Juilliard School. He pursued a traditional liberal arts education to add to his conservatory training, graduating from Harvard University in 1976.

Mr. Ma has received many awards, including the Avery Fisher Prize (1978), Glenn Gould Prize (1999), National Medal of the Arts (2001), Dan David Prize (2006), Sonning Prize (2006), World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award (2008), and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2010). Mr. Ma serves as a United Nations Messenger of Peace and as a member of the President’s Committee on the Arts & Humanities. He has performed for eight American presidents, most recently at the invitation of President Obama on the occasion of the 56th Inaugural Ceremony.

Yo-Yo Ma and his wife have two children. Mr. Ma plays two instruments, a 1733 Montagnana cello from Venice and the 1712 Davidoff Stradivarius.

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Soloist

Blossom Music Festival

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Symphony No. 6 in D major, Opus 60 composed 1880

the value of persistence, let him or her consider the case of Antonín Dvořák, a violist in the orchestra of the Provisional Theater in Prague, who doggedly produced symphonies, string quartets, songs, and much else with little recognition until 1875, when a juror named Johannes Brahms, working for the Austrian State Stipend, looked at a package of Dvořák’s compositions and declared the 34-year-old composer “a very talented man.”

Things happened fast after that. The renowned critic Eduard Hanslick, a Brahms partisan, took up Dvořák’s cause as well. Brahms’s publisher Simrock brought out several Dvořák works, and commissioned a set of Slavonic Dances for piano duet modeled on Brahms’s popular Hungarian Dances. These proved to be such runaway bestsellers that Dvořák’s name became a household word, seemingly on every piano rack in the Austrian empire — and beyond. Orchestras and conductors clamored for music by him.

The composer himself could hardly believe his good fortune, after so much toil in obscurity. His letters from that time are full of wonder at new experiences. In September 1879, unable to be in all places at once, Dvořák missed the first performance of his Slavonic Rhapsody No. 3 in Berlin, but he was able to hear the redoubtable Hans Richter conduct it in Vienna shortly thereafter. Dvořák wrote that, following an “incomparably fine” performance, “I had to promise to come to the performance of the Serenade and had to assure the Philharmonic that I would send them a symphony for the next season. The day after the concert, Richter gave a banquet at his house, in my honor so to speak, to which he invited all the Czech members of the orchestra. It was a grand evening which I shall not easily forget as long as I live.”

Dvořák began sketching the promised symphony the following summer, and eventually wrote at the end of the sketch, “Thanks be to God! Ended at 8:30 in the evening of September 20, 1880.” Finishing the orchestration on October 15, he set four copyists to work making the fair copy to rush to Richter in Vienna. But the Philharmonic dragged its feet in scheduling a performance, and so the premiere eventually and instead went to the Prague Philharmonic, led by Adolf Čech, in March IF AN YONE DOUBT S

by

Antonín

DVOŘÁK born September 8, 1841 Nelahozeves, Bohemia died May 1, 1904 Prague

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About the Music

The Cleveland Orchestra

1881. The piece was rapturously received, and the Czech-flavored furiant scherzo had to be repeated. Dvořák decided to let stand the piece’s dedication to Richter, who finally conducted the work in London in 1882, by which time, because Dvořák’s music was such a hot property, the performance was not even a local premiere.

This was the first of Dvořák’s symphonies to see print, and the public’s ignorance of his five previous efforts in the genre remained so deep and persistent that there are still plenty of people walking around today who first got to know this music as Dvořák’s “Symphony No. 1.” Listening to it makes clear that, at the time, Dvořák enjoyed not only Brahms’s patronage but his artistic influence as well.

THE MUSIC

The Czech composer was certainly not alone in Brahms guidance, but still, the opening bars of the symphony’s first movement are so wonderfully characteristic of Dvořák’s rhythmic verve and appealing turn of phrase that it is startling to hear him take this blithe material and immediately begin worrying it à la Brahms. However, one can appreciate how good Dvořák is at “doing” Brahms while one waits for these lovely tunes to return in their original form. Dvořák, although a violist himself, nevertheless had a way with a cello tune, and two beauties emerge among the many attractive ideas in this movement. The development section of the movement is first mysterious, then playful, but always colorful. Eventually, the themes return pretty much in order, and no less welcome for that, before the lively coda displays them in yet more new guises.

A soft modulating passage, in the manner of the same point in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, slides us gently down from bright D major into the gentle world of B-flat major for the second movement Adagio, a slice of music plainly inspired by the expressive breadth of the Bonn master’s great movements in that same tempo. But ultimately the movement is memorable more for its sensitive scoring and pure-hearted Dvořákian lyricism than for its Beethovenian forte interruptions.

On the other hand, Dvořák is the sole master of all he surveys in the irresistible third movement scherzo, an elaboration of the Slavonic dance rhythms that made him famous — specifically, the furiant, with its distinctive rhythmic play of twos and threes. The movement’s Trio section ventures far Blossom Festival 2014

About the Music

This was the first of Dvorák’s symphonies to see print, when it was presented as “Symphony No. 1.”

Listening to it makes clear that, at the time, Dvorák enjoyed not only Brahms’s patronage but his artistic influence as well. v

v

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At a Glance Dvořák wrote his Sixth Symphony in 1880. The first performance took place in Prague on March 25, 1881, with Adolf Čech conducting.

The United States premiere was given by Theodore Thomas and the New York Philharmonic Society on January 6, 1883. It was the first of Dvořák’s symphonies to be published, in Berlin in 1882, and was thus issued as “Symphony No. 1.” The printed score was dedicated to conductor Hans Richter.

(Dvořák’s symphonies were renumbered in the chronological order of their composition in the 1950s.)

This symphony runs about 40 minutes in performance. Dvořák scored it for 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings.

away from the big dance to a pastoral landscape with a lone, piping flute — a favorite Dvořák genre scene, sounding even more tender here because the flute is a piccolo.

The pianissimo opening of the finale is so similar to the same place in Brahms’s Second Symphony—also in D, published just three years before Dvořák composed this piece—it is almost as if the composer is saying, as Brahms did when somebody pointed out a resemblance between his First Symphony and Beethoven’s Ninth, “Every jackass notices that!” And Dvořák might also go on to say, “Now, listen to how I do it”—because the Dvořák way isn’t the Brahms way. It’s more straight-ahead, tuneful, and funny. And when it’s time to throw the themes together contrapuntally in this sonata-form movement, there isn’t a hint of Brahmsian fretting; instead, the butcher’s son from Nelahozeves just grins and stirs the pot with his muscular arms. The movement comes to a satisfying, full-circle close with the brass’s grand re-statement of the opening theme.

—David Wright © 2014 David Wright lives and writes in Wellesley, Massachusetts. He previously served as program annotator for the New York Philharmonic.

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About the Music

Blossom Music Festival

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EXPERIENCE MORE BLOSSOM! See a full listing of 2014 Blossom Music Festival concerts on pages 36-37 of the Festival Book.

August 23 Saturday

Carmina Burana Experience one of the most popular masterpieces of the 20th century in Carl Orff ’s compelling tale for chorus, orchestra, and soloists. Infused with spirited rhythms, catchy melodies, and songs of love, lust, and drink — amidst the recurring change of seasons and the never-ending wheels of fortune and fate. With the Blossom Festival Chorus.

O FOR TUNA!

August 24 Sunday

A Beatles Tribute of their arrival in the United States — it seems like just “yesterday” when the Fab Four first came to America. From the early hits through the solo years, relive the best of the Beatles with Classical Mystery Tour, the group that has been called “the most amazing Beatles tribute band ever.”

Don’t miss this one-night-only event!

C E LE BR ATING THE 50TH ANNIVE RSARY

August 30 Saturday

Family FunFest fun for the whole family! Bring the kids and share the magical experience of Blossom and live symphonic music. A fun-filled concert featuring tunes from The Little Mermaid, The Wizard of Oz, Frozen, and more. Featuring great familyfriendly activities and a post-concert fireworks show!

L ABOR DAY WE E KE ND