By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 21, 2023 performance – Today’s program featured the aptly sub-titled ninth symphony by the Czech composer Antonin Dvorák, which he wrote while on an extended visit to the New World. His time Stateside was split between NYC, where he was paid lavishly to direct the National Conservatory of Music and a town in Iowa, where a large cohort of Czech immigrants helped allay his homesickness. With Dandong, China native Xian Zhang at the podium, we Tanglewood patrons are well-reminded of the borderless nature of music! (Hilary Scott photos)
Ms. Zhang was masterful and energetic in leading the orchestra through Dvorak’s score; this is one of those rare compositions that sounds familiar, thanks to its widespread popularity, but which never sounds trite.
It should be always a happy occasion when an Aaron Copland composition is on the program at Tanglewood, which would be an alien place without the forty years he devoted to it. But, even though the performance was just lovely, the very idea of modifying anything as sacred as the collaboration between Copland and Martha Graham is a bad one.
What’s worse is the choreographer’s mistake in calling his derivative work, “Spring,” because his piece differs from the the Appalachian Spring of Copland/Graham, which he writes in the program was about life on the “American frontier.” I’m no geographer, but I know that both Appalachia and Appalachian music are nestled in the heart of America, not out on some imaginary frontier.
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Xian Zhang, conductor
Nimbus Dance
Samuel Pott, artistic director and choreographer
COPLAND Appalachian Spring
Intermission
DVOrÁK Symphony No. 9, From the New World