ZHANG CONDUCTS DVOŘÁK’S NEW WORLD SYMPHONY

Nokuthula Ngwenyama is a composer and violist. Her piece Primal Message is a tribute to the Arecibo message, in which 186 seconds of interstellar radio waves sent a friendly greeting toward the M13 globular cluster. Ngwenyama imagined what a “primal message” between worlds might sound like.

Florence Price is enjoying renewed interest that befits her long-overlooked achievement. A graduate of Boston’s New England Conservatory, she flourished as a composer after moving to Chicago in 1927. She wrote about 300 works, ranging from songs and piano pieces to concertos and four symphonies, the first of which was premiered in 1931 by the Chicago Symphony—the first symphonic work by an African-American woman ever performed by a major American orchestra. Her Piano Concerto in One Movement, hailed at its premiere for “thematic substance rich in syncopated and spiritual colors,” includes allusions to African-American traditional music. It packs into its span the essentials of a late-Romantic concerto: a dramatic opening, a lyrical center portion, and a buoyant, syncopated conclusion.

Antonín Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony was the first in the series of works the composer wrote during his sojourn in the United States. He was interested in American music, and he later noted that he tried to reproduce the essence of Native American and African-American songs in his works of this period. Dvořák’s subtitle, From the New World, has invited all manner of speculation, and, buoyed by Dvořák’s own allusions, musicologists have found in its melodies echoes of such undeniably American tunes as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”
—After notes by Nokuthula Ngwenyama and James M. Keller