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Dvorak’s Prophecy Vol.1: Dvorak’s New World Symphony - A Lens on the American Experience of Race (DVD)

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Label: Naxos - DVD

Cat No: 2110703

Barcode: 0747313570355

Format: DVD

Number of Discs: 1

Release Date: 21st January 2022

Works

Horovitz, Joseph

Hiawatha Melodrama (after Dvorak) (Michael Beckerman)

Artists

Kevin Deas (narrator, baritone)
PostClassical Ensemble

Conductor

Angel Gil-Ordonez

Works

Horovitz, Joseph

Hiawatha Melodrama (after Dvorak) (Michael Beckerman)

Artists

Kevin Deas (narrator, baritone)
PostClassical Ensemble

Conductor

Angel Gil-Ordonez

About

A PostClassical Ensemble ‘More than Music’ film series
Written and produced by Joseph Horowitz
Visual presentation by Peter Bogdanoff

‘The six Dvořák’s Prophecy films I have created with Peter Bogdanoff are an act of advocacy.

‘As in my companion book Dvořák’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music, my premise is that the “standard narrative” for classical music in the US – the one I grew up with, popularized by Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein – shortchanges the American achievement. Following W.E.B. Du Bois, who called the “sorrow songs” of Black America “the singular spiritual heritage of the nation,” and Antonín Dvořák, who prophesied that “negro melodies” would find a “great and noble” American school, I begin not with Copland and the modernists, but with Dvořák and his protégé Harry Burleigh, who turned “Deep River” into a sublime concert song. I treat Charles Ives as an American creative genius comparable to Whitman and Melville. The standard narrative makes no room for a morbid Romantic like Bernard Herrmann – to my ears, the most under-rated 20th-century American composer, and not just for his terrific film scores. It omits William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony – forgotten following its galvanizing 1934 premiere by Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. And it fails to reckon with Lou Harrison, whose majestic Piano Concerto may be the most formidable by any American. The films therefore argue for a longer, more eventful New World odyssey, documenting both democratic ideals and the legacy of slavery.’

– Joseph Horowitz

This first film in the series keys on Dvořák’s prophecy and explores its present-day pertinence. His New World Symphony, still the best-known and best-loved symphonic work conceived on American soil, is saturated with the influence of plantation song, and also with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. This act of appropriation, as the film argues, was an act of empathy performed by a great humanitarian. The musical selections here are mainly taken from the Hiawatha Melodrama (Naxos 8559777), which author Joseph Horowitz co-composed with the music historian Michael Beckerman, with orchestrations by Angel Gil-Ordóñez.

Playing time: 83 minutes