Dvorak Symphony No. 9, "From the New World" - LIVE with the Aalborg Symphony!

I had the great joy to do my first ever live edition of Sticky
Notes last month with the Aalborg Symphony in Denmark. For this
concert, I chose a piece that is extremely close to my heart,
Dvorak's New World Symphony. The story of the New World Symphony
is a fascinating one. The symphony was the result of an
extraordinary series of events, with Dvorak coming to America in
1892, meeting the great singer Harry Burleigh, and falling in
love with a totally new, to him, genre of music: Black American
and Native American folk music. Listening to Burleigh and other
voices around America, Dvorak had discovered a new “American”
sound for his music, and even though he would end up staying in
the US for just three years, in that time he composed two of his
most popular pieces, the American String Quartet, and the New
World Symphony


But of course, the New World Symphony isn’t really an American
piece. It is a piece written in America by a Czech composer,
which means it embodies traits from both sides of the Atlantic.
 Moments of Black American influence elide into Czech
Slavonic Dances and back again with incredible ease.  All
along the way, Dvorak infuses his highly traditional symphonic
style with this "American" sound, a sound that enraptured the
public from the very first time they heard it, and remains both
incredibly popular and incredibly moving, today. Join myself and
the Aalborg Symphony for this exploration of the symphony,
followed by a complete performance. I'm extremely grateful to the
Danish Radio for allowing me to use this performance for the
show.