Antonín Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B Minor is one of the greatest masterpieces in the romantic repertoire. The Concerto was written during the third and final year that the composer spent in New York at the National Conservatory and it was completed on 9 February 1895. It was first performed on 19 March 1896 in London by Leo Stern, though it had initially been intended for Czech cellist Hanuš Wihan to perform it.
Dvořák began writing it after the immense success of the ultra-romantic Second Cello Concerto in B Minor by Victor Herbert, the Irish cellist, composer and conductor and a colleague at the Conservatory. The latter had recently arrived in the USA where he became leader of the cellos in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, a member of the New York String Quartet and the creator of an orchestra of his own that performed light music as well as composing popular operettas. But he was also an acclaimed composer of serious music.
Dvořák’s work on the Concerto did not flow easily. He had left for America for the first time alone, without his family, and that increased his nostalgia. Unlike his earlier American works, (the New World symphony or the Fourteenth Quartet), the Cello Concerto is free of Americanisms. In the middle of the second section one can hear the theme of Dvořák’s song Leave Me Alone (Op. 82 No 1). The story of its composition is connected with the composer’s hearing of the sickness and death of his wife’s sister, with whom he had once been in love. In the finale the theme returns – in the final duet of the cello and the solo violin.
Anna Bulycheva
In the four movements of this aural, finely woven
fabric one can hear and see miracles...
Boris Asafiev
“The idea of an orchestral piece based on scenes from Schéhérazade came to me in the middle of winter in 1887,” Rimsky-Korsakov wrote in his Chronicle of My Musical Life. In just two months in the summer of 1888 the composer had completed the score of the four-movement suite for full symphony orchestra.
“The programme that guided me when composing Schéhérazade,” Rimsky-Korsakov continues, “were individual scenes – not connected with one another – taken from One Thousand and One Nights, scattered throughout the four movements of the suite: The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship,
The Tale of the Kalendar Prince,
The Young Prince and the Young Princess and Festival at Baghdad.
The Sea. The Ship Breaks against a Cliff
Surmounted by a Bronze Horseman.
A great musical storyteller, Rimsky-Korsakov created a work that truly stands alone with its amazingly picturesque nature, the orchestral colours and its almost tangible aural inventiveness. It is not for nothing that the score of Schéhérazade has received incredibly lofty praise from such musical “illustrators” as Debussy and Ravel. At the same time, in Schéhérazade one can make out a deep and philosophical subtext – a hymn to the majesty of nature and the all-conquering power of human love and the glory of the creative spirit... The visible expressiveness and plastique imagery of the music stir the listener’s imagination even without the programme titles.
Iosif Raiskin
