Music for lovers of the natural world. Dvořák was a gardener, and loved to roam the fields and woods surrounding his home in southern Bohemia. The tone of his Eighth Symphony is one of bucolic euphoria, the sheer joy of being alive in a world of natural wonders, filled with birdcalls and dance tunes.
The performance opens with Mozart’s Linz Symphony, widely regarded as one of his great mature symphonies. Mozart and his wife, Constanze, were passing through Linz while travelling from Salzburg to Vienna when they were invited by an old family friend, the Count Thun-Hohenstein, to stay for several days and give a concert. Mozart was unprepared, so he composed this symphony in six days. The resulting work is Mozart at his best — wittily elegant and dazzling. Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lilacs” is based on Walt Whitman’s poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” a poignant elegy to Abraham Lincoln.
Friday, January 28, 2022, at 8 p.m.
Saturday, January 29, 2022, at 8 p.m.
The Cleveland Orchestra
Franz Welser-Möst, conductor
Latonia Moore, soprano
MOZART Symphony No. 36 (“Linz”)
WALKER Lilacs for Voice and Orchestra
DVOŘÁK Symphony No. 8
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