DAWID RUNTZ, Conductor

In collaboration with the Academy of Music, University of Zagreb.

 

Felix Mendelssohn‑Bartholdy: Double Concerto in D minor for Violin, Piano, and Strings, MWV O 4

Ivo Josipović: Overture to the opera Lennon

Antonín Dvořák: Symphony No. 9 in E minor Op. 95, B. 178 "From the New World"

We can talk about the New Continent, discovered, conquered and enslaved by fire, sword and the Bible, in a different way, trying to discover moments of contact between different civilizations that found themselves in conflict. An interesting testimony of such research is provided by Antonín Dvořák in his Ninth Symphony From the New World. As he was invited to establish the professional musical life of the United States of America as an eminent European composer, he listened to all music there and, in accordance with the European national schools of composition of the time, he tried to find the musical features of the newly born nation.  Those musical features did not belong to one people, but were found in both American Indian songs and in the blues of African Americans brought there to be slaves. Dvořák interrupts that musical layer with wistful recollections of the melodies of his homeland.

 

About seventy years later, The Beatles also conquered the New World and built their music on the synthesis of European and American pop idioms. Their most artistically relevant member, John Lennon, was assassinated. He became the inspiration for Croatian composer and former president of Croatia, Ivo Josipović, for an opera that deals retrospectively with Lennon's career. Two years after the opera’s premiere, Ivo Josipović wrote the overture, which we will get to hear for the first time at this concert. Both pieces, as well as Mendelssohn's Double Concerto for Violin, Piano and Strings, will be performed by the Orchestra of the Academy of Music, University of Zagreb, under the confident baton of conductor Dawid Runtz.