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1 CD -
3984-24487-2 - (p) 1999
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Antonín
Dvořák (1841-1904) |
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Symphony No. 8 in C major,
Op. 88 |
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36' 32" |
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- Allegro con brio
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10' 47" |
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1
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- Adagio |
10' 02" |
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2
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- Allegretto grazioso |
6' 09" |
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3
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- Allegro ma non troppo
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9' 31" |
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4
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The Noon Witch "Polednice",
Op. 108 |
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14' 09" |
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- Allegretto |
5' 44" |
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5
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- Andante sostenuto e molto
tranquillo, |
3' 39" |
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6
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- Allegro |
2' 08" |
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7
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- Andante |
2' 39" |
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8
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Royal
Concertgebouw Orchestra |
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Nikolaus
Harnoncourt |
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Luogo
e data di registrazione
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Het
Concertgebouw, Amsterdam (Olanda) -
dicembre 1998 |
Registrazione
live / studio
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live
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Producer
/ Engineer
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Wolfgang
Mohr / Martina Gottschau / Friedemann
Engelbrecht / Michael Brammann / Tobias
Lehmann
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Prima Edizione CD
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Teldec
Classics - 3984-24487-2 - (1 cd) - 50'
46" - (p) 1999 - DDD |
Prima
Edizione LP
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"To rethink
the works completely afresh"
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Nikolaus
Harnoncourt in conversation with Klaus
Döge on Dvořák as a symphonist and
symphonic poet
Klaus Döge: Dvořák
is the third 19th-century composer
after Brahms and Bruckner whose works
you're now recording on an appreciable
scale. What draes tou to this
composer? And what is his attraction
for you as an interpreter?
Nikolaus Harnoncourt: I got to
know Dvořák’s music from an early age.
My father played the piano and we used
to perform Dvořák’s piano trios at home.
During my seventeen years as an
orchestral cellist, from 1952 to 1969, I
often played the three great symphonies
- the Seventh not so often, the Eighth
very often and the "New World" Symphony
several times a yeah. I was always very
moved by this music. But it annoyed me
that it was routinely dismissed as the
work of a lightweight composer. You
really can’t reproach a composer for
drawing on such a profusion of ideas! I
think that Dvořák’s music has an immense
depth to it; it has a beauty,
melancholy, yearning, a typically Slav
valedictory mood and a sadness that are
characteristic of all Czech music. It’s
not sentimentality, but very profound
expression; and it`s music that can
easily come to grief. You have only to
allow the brass to play a little too
loudly and the whole musical texture is
reduced to a great harmonic mush, albeit
one that sounds quite splendid. But the
music contains a large number of
elaborate details, and I really can’t
understand musicians who treat Dvořák
like some hack composer who, they
concede, writes fantastic works of great
musicality but whom they still regard as
just a little inferior to the great
composers of his day.
This view of Dvořák
has implications for the way in which
his works are routinely interpreted...
Yes, and the works that are most often
enlisted here are the Slavonic Dances.
But these pieces are difficult to play
well, and I'm not prepared to perform
them in the concert hall unless I have
enough rehearsals.With Dvořák you pay a
high price for any untidiness and lack
of precision. My working method involves
rethinking works like the Eighth
Symphony and asking whether the dots
over the notes merely indicate that the
notes in question are not legato and, if
not, whether they should be long or
short, and what type of articulation
Dvořák had in mind with this range of
staccato markings, from hammered marcato
to barely separated staccato cantabile.
As for the tonal balance, here too there
is a lot that needs careful
consideration when you've got three
trombones and a tuba, together with four
horns and two trumpets, pitted against a
woodwind department with a completely
different dynamic range and when you see
how meticulously Dvořák differentiates
the dynamics: he doesn't write a
fortissimo for the full orchestra, but
always takes account of its weakest
member, so you can always tell that it
is the flute that has to play
fortissimo, while the other instruments
all have to play in such a way that the
flute can be heard and understood. I
have to say in this context that it is
very stimulating when one has enough
rehearsal time and can really rethink
these works completely afresh, bar by
bar.
Anyone listening to the Eighth
Symphony will find many sudden
insights, notably in the case of the
flute interjections in the second
movement. They sound more forced than
usual.
The flutes don’t take up the musical
argument and carry it forward but are a
reaction to it. This is clear from the
fact that Dvořák later entrusts these
outbursts to the strings, where
they become real fortissimo screams,
interrupting the melodic line. It`s as
though the imaginative world of the act
of composition, with its cut and thrust
of argument and counterargument, comes
alive here over and above the notes
themselves. I find this very pronounced
here.
Although the Eighth is Dvořák's
second most popular symphony it is
also, in a sense, his most
controversial...
On account of its form.The doyen
ofViennese music critics, Eduard
Hanslick, said that it was fragmentary
and rhapsodical, while Brahms expressed
the view that it contained only
irrelevancies, but nothing of substance.
It is possible to see these remarks
against the background of their age, and
I`ve long been preoccupied by this
question. Dvořák was undoubtedly
familiar with the norms of sonata form,
and in his early symphonies he took up
and developed a Schumannesque variant of
this form.That he now trumps it with
sovereign mastery, playing with it as a
composer, using it in a way quite
different from Brahms and genuinely
refashioning it means that, for me, he
succeeds in creating a convincing
original structure. Players have to be
made aware of this, otherwise all you
get is a kind of notesplnning that may
be very beautiful but which obscures the
novelty of the work. I felt this most
powerfully in the case of the final
movement, where, towards the end, a
great lyrical block arises as a variant
of the cello theme. Under this heading,
too, come the accelerandos in the codas
of the first and last movements, the
second of which brings the work to an
end almost in the manner of a waterfall.
The Eighth Symphony dates from
1889, when Dvořák
no longer saw himself as an absolute
musician but, increasingly, as a tone
poet. The work must surely have been
affected by this development.
I’m convinced of it. The themes are so
eloquent. Even the introductory theme is
highly expressive as a result of its
suspensions, its gestural language and
its instrumentation. But the question
remains: did Dvořák intend to convey to
his listeners a particular concrete
meaning, or was it not important to him
how listeners interpreted it? If the
player performs in what I might call an
eloquent manner and recognises the
work's marked rhetorical component, he
will play it differently, and the
audience will hear a much more
expressive piece. I have always been
interested in the language of music and
asked myself what are the rhetorical
figures in Bach's music and the
linguistic gestures in Mozart’s. And
then suddenly I read that Beethoven says
that a musician who does not understand
rhetoric cannot compose. As a conductor
I want to have all the information I can
about the work I am conducting,
information both intrinsic and extrinsic
to the piece,and I also want the players
to share this information, because the
interpretation will be more convincing
as a result. But I do not think that
Dvořák wanted to convey any concrete
information to the audience of the
Eighth Symphony. He was concerned,
rather, with universal expressive images
and chains of association that each
individual listener can experience for
him- or herself.
By contrast, the music of Dvořák’s
symphonic poem The Noon Witch
demands to be interpreted in concrete
terms...
When Mendelssohn writes a concert
overture about the tale of the fair
Melusine, he knows perfectly well that
there will not be a single person in the
audience who is not familiar with this
story. And when Dvořák writes The Noon
Witch - first and foremost for his Czech
compatriots - he knows that everyone
will be familiar with Karel Jaromír
Erben’s ballad and that even those
listeners who do not know Erben’s poem
in detail will at least be familiar with
the underlying story, just as we are
familiar with the story of Hansel and
Gretel. And if a composer writes a
symphonic poem called The Noon Witch, we
know very well that it will be about a
mother who threatens her screaming child
with the noon witch, until the witch
herself arrives and takes the child
away. Basically, it is a musical
exploration of the theme of guilt and
the way we come to terms with such
guilt.
Haw does Dvořák
translate his programmatical
source into music? ls the
word-painting doggedly literal, as
music critics have often complained?
Sometimes he takes a line from the poem
- especially if it is exceptionally
striking - and uses it to create a clear
rhythm, an eloquent atmosphere. I mean,
it`s simply impossible for word-painting
to be as doggedly literal as it is with
Richard Strauss, for example. Dvořák
never did anything like that. He
musicalises and dramatises the text: the
witch`s motif, for instance, first
appears at the start of the idyll, while
the child is playing games; in a way,
this turns the idyll on its head.Then
the witch arrives with the
recitative-like motif, “Give me the
child". And then comes the dance.
Everyone can hear that this is a dance,
everyone knows the expression "witch’s
dance”. And you can hear the hobbling,
hopping witch with her broomstick in the
woodwinds’ sharply dotted rhythm, which
is heard in counterpoint to a variant of
the motif associated with the children's
screams, suggesting less of a triumph
than a desire to evoke a sense of terror
by purely musical means. This eerie
dance increases our fear that something
terrible is happening. I can well
understand what Leoš Janáček meant when
he wrote that whenever he heard this
chromatic contrary motion he could
literally see the witch`s bony hand
reaching out to grab the child.
Musically speaking, I lind this
incredibly vivid, immediately
intelligible and really very very
powerful.
Translation:
Stewart Spencer
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Nikolaus
Harnoncourt (1929-2016)
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