Sunday morning Kabalesvki & Dvořák

What are you going to listen to?

Kabalevsky

In the Soviet Union, many composers suffered badly from the prevailing Communist cultural politics. One composer who kept his blazon clean was Dmitri Kabalevsky. A teacher at the Moscow Conservatory, he grew into a prominent figure in the music world since the 1930s. During World War II, he became active for the Communist Party, wrote patriotic songs and cantatas and held administrative positions for the Communist Composers' Federation.

Kabalevsky additionally immersed himself in music education and developed teaching methods for children. Consequently, of the solo concertos Kabalevsky wrote, many were composed for study purposes. The Second cello concerto from 1964 is anything but that. He composed it for the famous cellist Daniil Shafran. The work is at times lyrical or mysterious, at other times exhilarating and virtuosic. The use of an alto saxophone in the Presto marcato even evokes associations with light music culture. In the large cadenzas, the soloist bridges the various movements.

As a composer, Kabalevsky made a name for himself mainly thanks to his opera overture Colas Breugnon and his Suite "The Comedians," works that stayed neatly within the artistic framework of official party ideology. This earned him several state awards including the prestigious Lenin Order.

Dvořák

Antonín Dvořák began his musical career as a viola player at the Bohemian Provisional Theater in Prague, the forerunner of the then under construction National Theater. Despite the theater's makeshift name, its artistic quality was high: Dvořák played there under conductor and house composer Smetana, and his idol Wagner conducted his own works there.

Nevertheless, at age 30, he quit his job to make time for composing. This succeeded thanks to the Austrian State Scholarship. This was awarded to him no less than three times, hoping to give him the financial space to develop his artistic talent. After this, things went uphill with Dvořák's composing ambitions. In almost all of his music, Dvořák's connection to Slavic culture is reflected, sometimes in the form of folk songs or dance rhythms, sometimes in a rendering of nature. This can also be heard in his Eighth Symphony.

By now the composer had established a good relationship with his publisher Simrock, but when Dvořák offered the new symphony in 1889, Simrock wanted to offer the composer only a fraction of the amount he had paid for the Seventh Symphony. At that time, the publisher had no desire to produce expensive symphonic playing material. Dvořák saw this as an enormous insult. Meanwhile, since he enjoyed considerable popularity in England, he got the work published by the London publisher Novello. This sometimes earned the symphony the nickname "the English one.

Although the Eighth Symphony is in G major, the work opens with a melancholy melody in minor. The prescribed Allegro con brio (lively) is not heard until the flute introduces the major with a bird-like call. Throughout the first movement, Dvořák continues to play with the contrasts between melancholic and lively, dark and light, major and minor.

It is easy to hear in the Adagio that Dvořák was also a great opera composer. The movement begins evocatively, as if nature is calling us into the forest (again birdlike exclamations in the horns), followed by theatrical outbursts that seem inspired by operas by Wagner. A graceful waltz in the third movement flanks a trio in which a long melody is accompanied by a playful rhythm.

The concluding movement begins with a fanfare that once elicited from Czech conductor Kubelík the statement, "In Bohemia the trumpets never call for war - they always call for dancing!" There are some references to the first movement, particularly in the thematic material and the melancholy interjections. Yet it never becomes a real play between dark and light: the party is the focus.

Frans Boendermaker