Over the river and through the wood, to grandmother’s house we go…
Who are we kidding? We’re not going anywhere.
While you’re whiling away the hours in Thanksgiving traffic, I hope you’ll join me on The Classical Network, on this busiest travel day of the year, as I crown a late afternoon of American music with an hour calculated to put you in a thankful frame of mind.
Sure, in the amount of time it takes you to get where you’re going, Antonin Dvořák very likely was able to cross the Atlantic, to assume the directorship of the newly-minted National Conservatory of Music in New York. Some of the composer’s most beloved works had their genesis in his stay in the United States – the “New World” Symphony and the Cello Concerto in B minor, among them.
Of his chamber music, I imagine none of it is more frequently encountered than his “American” String Quartet in F major, Op. 96. Written during the summer of 1893, while the composer was on holiday in the Czech community of Spillville, Iowa, the work is beautiful and ingratiating to an extraordinary degree. What’s puzzling is why the composer’s equally beautiful and ingratiating String Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 97, composed in Spillville immediately after – and also sometimes identified as the “American” – has not achieved the same degree of popularity.
We’ll get to enjoy it this evening, in a performance featuring a young Joshua Bell, who joins violinist Felix Galimir, violists Ulrich Eichenauer and Judith Busbridge, and cellist Wendy Sutter, at the 1989 Marlboro Music Festival.
Dvořák’s underrated quintet will be flanked by two works by American composers.
We’ll begin with Vincent Persichetti, who was born in Philadelphia in 1915. (He died there in 1987.) Although Persichetti seems to have had more of a lasting influence as a teacher – having molded legions of budding composers through his work at Combs College of Music, the Philadelphia Conservatory, and the Juilliard School – his own compositions are invariably well-crafted and certainly well worth listening to.
Persichetti composed 15 serenades for a variety of instrumental combinations. We’ll hear the Serenade No. 10, from 1961. It was performed at Marlboro, by flutist Julia Bogorad and harpist Rita Tursi, in 1976.
The hour will conclude with an 8-minute Woodwind Quintet by the dread Elliot Carter. Carter is the kind of composer who, for the six decades or so that comprised his artistic maturity, had a tendency to get lost in his own head. (He lived to 103 and wrote right up to the very end.) Not to worry: in 1948, he still had one foot in Audience Land.
We’ll hear Carter’s quintet performed in 2006 by flutist Valérie Tessa Chermiset, oboist Winnie Cheng-Wen Lai, clarinetist Charles Neidich, bassoonist Martin Garcia, and hornist Wei-Ping Chou.
Classic Ross Amico will be your co-pilot, on the next “Music from Marlboro.” Misery loves company, this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Happy Thanksgiving, and safe travels!
Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page
