Mahler Chamber Orchestra | Daniel Harding | Stefan Dohr

Lucerne Festival
Lucerne
Switzerland
http://e.lucernefestival.ch

Mahler Chamber Orchestra | Daniel Harding conductor | Stefan Dohr french horn

Can music suggest hypocrisy? Antonín Dvořák's late-period tone poem The Wood Dove tests the idea. It involves a widow who makes the motions of mourning at her husband’s coffin, but her grief turns out to be a sham, for she had poisoned her spouse… Dvořák translates the inner voice of her tormented conscience into the plaintive cooing of a dove that in the end drives the murderess to suicide. Meanwhile, the putatively “American” melodies of the New World Symphony turn out, on closer inspection, to be a mirage. In fact, their syncopated rhythms and pentatonic lines could just as well be at home in the Bohemian provinces. Dvořák himself once mentioned that there was a popular pub in Prague called “Nový svet,” which means “new world.” And this interesting tidbit could perhaps give his Ninth Symphony an intriguing double meaning.

Antonin Dvorak : The Wood Dove
Wolfgang Rihm : Horn Concerto
Antonin Dvorak : Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95 From the New World