$8 for Dvorak at Carnegie Hall

Made in the U.S.A. — Dvorak Comes to Carnegie Hall is part of the Carnegie Hall Family Concerts series, specially funded Saturday afternoon concerts at the great concert hall. It will take place at the Stern Auditorium at 2pm on March 10. Tickets are only $8 each. The concert, performed by the Orchestra of St. Lukes, covers the time that composer Antonin Dvorak visited United States and was inspired by our folk music. It also includes the music of American composers inspired by Dvorak.

Antonin Dvorak was born in 1841 in what is now the Czech Republic. A prolific composer, Dvorak wrote symphonies, an opera, concertos, and a number of religious and orchestral works, including the popular Slavonic Dances. Much of his music was imbued with folk themes that were popular in the Austrian-Hungarian region where he grew and lived. From 1892 to 1895, he visited the United States where he was the director of the New York Conservatory of Music on East 17th Street, near where he lived. It was in New York where he came into contact with several composers including John Phillip Sousa , Scott Joplin, and several others.

His meeting with an early African-American composer, Harry Burleigh, was particularly influential. Burleigh introduced Dvorak to traditional spiritual music sung by African-Americans, some dating back to the days of slavery. Some of those melodies inspired Dvorak as he composed his Symphony 9 “From the New World”, which had become his most popular and most performed work. Neil Armstrong took a recording of the ‘New World’ symphony to the Moon during the historic Apollo 11 mission, the first Moon landing, in 1969. Parts of it are played during funerals of American Statesman. The symphony was composed in 1893 at his New York home, which was demolished in the 1980’s to make way for a hospice for AIDS patients, as part of Beth Israel Medical Center.

Dvorak returned to Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he became director of its music conservatory, until he died in 1904. A DVD about Dvorak and his works was released in 2006.

Although the program was unavailable, this Carnegie Hall Family Concert may be a truly remarkable and memorable event. At $8 a ticket, it’s one of the best bargains in New York.

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