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    Dvorak’s Opera ‘Rusalka’ Prepares to Debut at La Scala in Milan

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    The opera by Antonin Dvorak about a water nymph’s journey into the human world, first performed in 1901, is making its debut at La Scala in June.Poor Rusalka. The title character of Antonin Dvorak’s opera is a love-struck water nymph, misunderstood and scorned. She has long been appreciated but was not exactly celebrated as an operatic heroine for decades before slowly emerging as a darling of the opera world.But now, “Rusalka” is having a moment that may charm even the most jaded of water nymphs. The opera will make its debut at La Scala in Milan next month, 122 years after it first delighted audiences in Dvorak’s native Czech homeland in 1901. Many might say it’s long overdue at one of the world’s most prestigious opera houses, but for the creative team assembled at La Scala it’s a chance to discover, or rediscover, an opera still being interpreted more than a century later.“Rusalka,” playing six performances from June 6 to 22, is based on Slavic folklore (with parallels to the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Little Mermaid”). Rusalka lives in a lake with her water-goblin father and falls in love with a prince. With the help of a local witch and a potion, she decides to become a human to win her prince. Let’s just say that things don’t exactly go her way.The design for the character Rusalka, a love-struck water nymph. “This Rusalka won’t have the fish tail like a mermaid, but she will have tentacles like an octopus,” the director, Emma Dante, said.Vanessa SanninoThe opera is known mostly for its first-act aria “Song to the Moon” — championed by many high-profile sopranos over the last few decades, including Renée Fleming — which has helped cement its position at several major opera houses. And now at La Scala.“I have directed at many opera houses and in the repertoire of each of them there was at least one opera that was conspicuously absent,” Dominique Meyer, the artistic director and chief executive of La Scala, said by email. “When I was directing the Vienna [State] Opera, we realized that ‘Anna Bolena’ had never been performed there. At La Scala, something similar happened with ‘Rusalka.’”Mr. Meyer said the debut production was the ideal vehicle to bring back Emma Dante, a theater and film director known for her 2013 movie “A Street in Palermo” as well as avant-garde theater and opera productions. Mr. Meyer cited her “imagination and sensitivity.”“I’m happy to come back to La Scala with an opera whose protagonist is a woman,” Ms. Dante said in a video interview. “My first time was with ‘Carmen,’ and I felt a strong connection with this woman, just as I do now with Rusalka.”Ms. Dante said she feels Rusalka’s journey into the human world — and her desire to be accepted there — is a timeless topic and applicable today in a world of refugees and political turmoil worldwide.A drawing of one of the sets for “Rusalka” with the title character at left.Carmine Maringola“She arrives in a land that is not her land, so I’m interested in that transformation,” Ms. Dante said. “I’m also deeply interested in how the community does not accept her diversity.”She worked with the costume designer Vanessa Sannino and the set designer Carmine Maringola, both of whom she has collaborated with before, to do more than emphasize the fairy-tale aspect of the story.“This Rusalka won’t have the fish tail like a mermaid, but she will have tentacles like an octopus, which you can see in a wheelchair when she first comes onto land,” Ms. Dante explained. “Also, we won’t have a lake, but instead the church and the prince’s palace will both be flooded to represent a world adrift. This flooded world is a catastrophic cause of nonacceptance, of intolerance toward those of different origins and appearance.”Ms. Sannino also wanted to emphasize the witch and the prince in this otherworldly setting.“We wanted the witch to be like a madonna, monochromatic red and immense and made of muscle fibers,” she said. “And the lightness that we decided to give the prince can be found in the flowers and butterflies in his cloak and in the armor he wears.”The costume design for the prince. “The lightness that we decided to give the prince can be found in the flowers and butterflies in his cloak and in the armor he wears,” the costume designer said.Vanessa SanninoThis approach seems fitting for an opera based on folklore, and not, say, a romantic Italian opera based on a famous book and specific to its time and place. It’s also open to discovery from a musical perspective.“It’s genius music, but Dvorak was not known as a typical opera composer, and therefore it comes with some difficulties that might not always sell the piece,” said the Czech conductor Tomas Hanus in a phone interview from his home in Brno, Czech Republic. He is making his debut at La Scala with “Rusalka,” which he also conducted at the Vienna State Opera (in his debut there in 2017) and in Copenhagen, Helsinki and Munich. “The Czech composing schools did not always teach how to write these big romantic operatic scores. It’s very dependent on the interpretation of singers and conductors.”That is a sentiment echoed by the Ukrainian soprano Olga Bezsmertna, who will sing the title role, which she has come to adore (she sang it at the Vienna State Opera in 2014 and 2020 and last year in Bratislava, Slovakia). It becomes more layered each time she sings it, she said.“It’s a very difficult opera, but my voice feels at home because I don’t have to push,” Ms. Bezsmertna said in a phone interview from her home in Vienna. “My first time in Vienna, I jumped in five days before the first performance. I honestly didn’t have time to think about what to do. But it’s perfect for a lyric soprano voice.”Ms. Bezsmertna has grown into the character more in the past few years, she said, especially the journey Rusalka takes both emotionally and musically.“The second act is so completely different from the first act because she is destroyed,” Ms. Bezsmertna said. “It’s not a fairy tale anymore. She’s alone, and the prince loves another woman. Life has changed completely.”And it’s in that fairy-tale-versus-real-world situation where “Rusalka” seems to flourish, despite its dark corners, for those who know the opera or for first-time viewers at the debut at La Scala.“Death is very present in ‘Rusalka,’ but we have to keep this idea of lightness,” Ms. Dante said. “It’s a tragedy, but it’s still a fairy tale. And we always have to look at death as an occasion for rebirth.” More

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      Review: ‘In Seven Days’ Conjures the Creation, With Video

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      The New York Philharmonic, conducted by Ruth Reinhardt, played Thomas Adès’s “In Seven Days,” for piano, orchestra and moving image.When will the New York Philharmonic stop importing all things Los Angeles?First, New York poached the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s chief executive — then, earlier this month, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s conductor.And concerts this week bring more: images of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, projected over the stage of David Geffen Hall. It’s getting ridiculous!Not that you would recognize Disney Hall in this form. The images of the building have been abstracted as part of the film accompaniment to Thomas Adès’s 2008 piano concerto “In Seven Days,” which the (New York) Philharmonic is performing with the pianist Kirill Gerstein under the baton of Ruth Reinhardt, in her debut with the orchestra.Adès’s music here, some of the best and most moving he has written, was conceived alongside Tal Rosner’s video. The half-hour piece is described by its creators as a “concerto for piano with moving image,” drawing on footage of Disney Hall and the Royal Festival Hall in London, the two spaces for which it was commissioned.Some of the film is lovely; I like the evocation of a shadowy, glinting jungle, and shifting, expanding geometric shapes conjure the jazzy, mid-20th-century look of Saul Bass’s movie title sequences. But on Thursday the endless kaleidoscope fractals mostly felt like a busy albatross around the score’s neck.And what a score. This is Adès at his most confident, elemental and ingenious. Brilliantly, the chaos of genesis at the start is not immediately chaotic, but rather an assertive, spiky motif with the slightest off-kilter dip to the rhythm, like something trying to catch its breath, to gather itself. The darkness of the universe is a brooding, gorgeous aria; the creation of the stars, a superhigh undulation amid glassiness, scattered through the piano and orchestra.Grim density flows into shining expanses, but this composer’s changeability and the creativity of his instrumental combinations keep it from ever sounding saccharine or sodden. Gerstein, who has played the piece many times, calmly negotiated its furious runs, granitic chords and tender wandering. For an encore, he gave Adès’s arrangement of the lonesome Berceuse from his opera “The Exterminating Angel.”The concerto offers a tantalizing impression of organic development and proliferation. That same quality was present — if in a quite different, more formally minimal vein — on Monday at Geffen’s new, intimate Sidewalk Studio in Julius Eastman’s “Femenine,” a piece from the mid-1970s that has been central to this composer’s posthumous rediscovery.At the Sidewalk Studio space, members of the Talea Ensemble and the Harlem Chamber Players performed Julius Eastman’s “Femenine.”Chris LeeSmall cells of material — including annunciatory themes as compelling as Adès’s — repeat (and repeat and repeat) and slowly evolve through the 70-minute work, over the ceaseless wintry shake of sleigh bells. The performers on Monday, a group drawn from the Talea Ensemble and the Harlem Chamber Players, juxtaposed, as Eastman intended, rhythmic alertness and regularity with woozy, oozing, shaggy sprawl.The Philharmonic can certainly play the Adès concerto, but its textures were not as clear or vivid on Thursday as they can be: the darknesses not as brutal nor the transparencies as shimmering. Grazyna Bacewicz’s motoric Overture for Orchestra, which opened the program, felt thick, too.After intermission, Dvorak’s Fifth Symphony was sometimes overly forceful. Reinhardt gave welcome prominence to the winds, but this orchestra doesn’t tend to dance gracefully, which made the internal movements heavy. By the Finale, though, more drama was made out of contrasting dynamics, with a candied, fairy-tale character to both the wistfulness and the high spirits.At the start of the concert, Reinhardt told the audience that the Philharmonic wanted to respond to the recent earthquake in Turkey and Syria, a lovely idea. But that response turned out to be an awkwardly played rendition of a cliché: the second movement of Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D, best known as the “Air on the G String.”Couldn’t the ensemble have simply dedicated the whole concert — or at least Adès’s concerto, a musical depiction of the wonders and terrors of nature — to those affected?New York PhilharmonicThis program is repeated through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      ‘The Great Czech Piano Cycle’ Arrives at Carnegie Hall

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      The pianist Leif Ove Andsnes is appearing at Carnegie with Dvorak’s “Poetic Tone Pictures,” a rarity being performed there for the first time.Carnegie Hall might have hosted the premiere of Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony in 1893, but it’s not every day, 130 years later, that a major work by that Czech composer is heard there for the first time.Still less, a solo piano cycle that lasts almost an hour. That’s what the unerringly sophisticated Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes will offer on Tuesday, in a recital anchored by Dvorak’s “Poetic Tone Pictures,” thirteen character pieces, written in 1889, that Andsnes recently recorded for Sony.Andsnes has known the work since he was a boy; his father had one of its few recordings in his collection. But he came to study it properly only in the time afforded by the pandemic.“Most of my colleagues won’t even know that Dvorak wrote this wonderful cycle for piano,” Andsnes, 52, said in an interview. “There is such a strange reputation around his music because he wasn’t a pianist, and people think that he didn’t write very well for the instrument.”But, Andsnes added: “He uses the piano in a very colorful way, in a very versatile way, every piece has new textures, new techniques. For me, this cycle really stands as the great Czech piano cycle.”In Dvorak’s piano writing, Andsnes said, “the imagination, the richness of melodic and harmonic invention and characterization is so wonderful, and so unique.”Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesTuesday’s concert will be Andsnes’s first solo recital at Carnegie Hall since 2015. Clive Gillinson, the hall’s executive and artistic director, said that the lapse was a matter of bad luck — injury, the pandemic — but also, more tellingly, that it spoke to the breadth of interests that makes Andsnes special.“We’ll say we’d love to have you back, and he’ll come back with an idea of collaborating with others, rather than just doing a piano recital,” Gillinson said. When Andsnes has appeared at the hall, it’s been in Brahms’s Piano Quartets, the Grieg concerto with the Boston Symphony and a “Rite of Spring” as a duo with Marc-André Hamelin.Andsnes’s latest solo recital is a case study in sensitive programming. Czech nationality connects Dvorak to Janacek, whose early 20th-century sonata, “1.X.1905,” commemorates a murdered political protester. That work’s relevance to demonstrations today, particularly over the Russian invasion of Ukraine, prompted Andsnes to surround it with a “Lamento” by Alexander Vustin, a Russian who was little known outside his country and died early in the pandemic, and a bagatelle by Valentin Silvestrov, whose music has come to represent Ukrainian resistance. Beethoven rounds out the program, because, as Andsnes put it, “Beethoven always seems to have a message.”In the interview, Andsnes discussed the “Poetic Tone Pictures” and more of Tuesday’s program. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.The standard view of Dvorak’s piano music, and especially his concerto, is that it is poorly written because he wasn’t a virtuoso himself. Could we say instead that he wrote pretty well for someone who didn’t play to a high standard?Absolutely. Sometimes when you’re not playing the instrument you might come up with solutions that are new, and unheard-of. I remember Christian Tetzlaff said a few years ago that, you know, who were the composers who wrote the groundbreaking new violin concertos? They were all pianists: Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Bartok. Nobody could imagine these shifts and sounds on the violin, and they didn’t know its limitations.I think Dvorak wrote wonderfully for the piano, most of the time. It’s not as comfortably written as Chopin or Schumann or Debussy, but there’s a lot of music like that. The imagination, the richness of melodic and harmonic invention and characterization is so wonderful, and so unique.Dvorak’s “Poetic Tone Pictures” will have its first Carnegie performance at Andsnes’s recital.Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesDid Dvorak intend the pieces to be played as a cycle?I found this quote from him. He wrote to a friend after finishing these pieces that he’s tried to be a poet, à la Schumann, but that it doesn’t sound like Schumann. And then he says, I hope that someone will have the courage to play all the pieces continuously, because only by doing that could one really understand his intentions.That was extremely interesting, because we’re talking about an hour of music here. If he thought about it as a cycle, that’s a very ambitious undertaking, and a much bigger cycle than any that were known at the time. Clara Schumann would always select pieces from her husband’s music, rarely playing “Kreisleriana” as one, or “Carnaval” as one. Sure enough, one gets into a state of mind and it seems to work out well — the contrasts between the pieces, and this wonderful farewell, “On the Holy Mountain,” which is such a benediction. It’s a real journey.Listening to your recording, I wondered whether the music’s fate has not just been about preconceptions about the writing, but the fact that an hourlong cycle is tricky to program.Even the single pieces are not known. I played these pieces in Prague in November, and I met the daughter of Rudolf Firkusny, the great Czech pianist. She said, “Maybe I can remember that my father played the third piece a couple of times as an encore,” but she didn’t know the music. Can you imagine? Firkusny played so much Czech music, and was famous for playing the Piano Concerto.Does the cycle have a narrative to it, or is it more a series of tableaux along the lines of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”?More like that, maybe a picture of Czech life. What I love about the cycle is, you have very spiritual pieces, the mystery of “The Old Castle” and “Twilight Way,” and on the other hand you have a piece called “Toying.” Another piece is called “Tittle-Tattle.” It’s everyday life, which you also have in “Pictures at an Exhibition,” or even in late Beethoven.Do you have a favorite piece among the 13?I love them all in very different ways, but there is one piece, the ninth, called “Serenade.” It’s such a great example of Dvorak’s real strengths. It begins as such a trivial piece, it has this very simple melody, serenading a loved one, with a guitar accompaniment. There’s almost no harmony in the beginning, and you wonder, is this really it?It isn’t, of course, because he suddenly changes the harmonies and it becomes so much richer. It gets to a middle section which is a sort of slow siciliano, which has a feeling of prayer, or a really beautiful love song, the most tender one can imagine. You just wonder how he went there, with the same melodic material. For me, he has such an ability to develop a very simple idea into a real jewel.Dvorak always suffers a bit in comparison with Brahms, because they were contemporaries and admired each other. Brahms has this obvious counterpoint and resistance in the music, we always feel that every voice is so rich. Dvorak doesn’t have that, and one can feel that the music is a little bit too easy to swallow. It depends on the performer to bring out all these subtleties.Has it become more important for you to reflect the world in your playing?It became quite special with this program. If one can find a relevant conversation with the music that we do and what is going on with the world, it’s wonderful, but I wouldn’t want to always look for something. It can be fabricated.The Janacek was speaking to me about now. Like so many, I felt affected by what’s going on, also being in this part of the world. As Norwegians we are a neighboring country to Russia, it really has affected so many of us everywhere; of course in the United States, too, but maybe even more in this part of the world.And in grim times, we often turn to Beethoven.Yes, so often there is a feeling of going through struggle, or fight in Beethoven’s music, trying to find solutions, or answers, or victory — somehow.If the “Poetic Tone Pictures” are a cycle, Andsnes said, “that’s a very ambitious undertaking, and a much bigger cycle than any that were known at the time.”Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York Times More

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      Let’s Make the Future That the ‘New World’ Symphony Predicted

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      To grasp in full this classic work’s complex legacy would allow us to move beyond it, fostering new paths for artists of color.The last live performance I attended before the lockdown last year featured excerpts from Nkeiru Okoye’s gripping 2014 opera “Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed That Line to Freedom.” The score takes listeners on a journey through Black musical styles, including spirituals, jazz, blues and gospel.“I am Moses, the liberator,” Harriet proclaims in her final aria, pistol in hand as she urges an exhausted man to continue running toward freedom. “You keep on going or die.”With its themes of survival and deliverance, Okoye’s work would make a fitting grand opening for an opera company’s post-pandemic relaunch. But the American classical music industry has too often chosen familiarity and homogeneity over the liberating power of diverse voices.To help break this inertia, we must confront a work that has left indelible marks on music in this country: Antonin Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony. To grasp in full the complex legacy of this classic piece would allow us to move beyond it, fostering new paths for artists of color.In 1893, the year of the symphony’s premiere, Dvorak argued in print that Black musical idioms should form the basis of an American classical style — not an entirely new position, but far from the norm at the time. Some white musicians were so scandalized that they accused reporters of misrepresenting Dvorak’s ideas. Of course, he meant exactly what he said, for he consistently reiterated his views, eventually adding Indigenous American music to his recommendations.Janinah Burnett in the title role of Nkeiru Okoye’s 2014 opera “Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed That Line to Freedom.”Richard Termine for The American Opera ProjectDvorak was true to his word in the “New World.” After finishing the symphony, he explained in an interview with the Chicago Tribune that he had studied certain songs from Black traditions until he became “thoroughly imbued with their characteristics” and felt “enabled to make a musical picture in keeping with and partaking of those characteristics.” Musical gestures inspired by these songs pervade the piece, such as the melodic contour of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” in the first movement and the second movement’s famous, plaintive Largo theme, which has often been mistaken as a direct quotation of a spiritual — but which actually was only later given words and turned into a spiritual, “Goin’ Home.”Echoing segregationist Jim Crow policies in force at the time, several white critics bent over backward to deny Black influence on the “New World” — despite Dvorak’s own words — as if African origins would preclude the piece’s place in the national musical fabric. Black writers, on the other hand, acknowledged the importance of his advocacy. Richard Greener, a former dean of what is now Howard University School of Law, suggested in 1894 that if Black musicians heeded Dvorak’s recommendations, they would “become greater than the lawgiver” — a clear challenge to the prevailing social order.Composers from a variety of racial backgrounds, including R. Nathaniel Dett, Amy Beach, Henry Gilbert, Florence Price, Dennison Wheelock, John Powell and Nora Holt, followed in Dvorak’s footsteps during the first quarter of the 20th century, writing a cascade of pieces invoking Black or Indigenous folk styles.White writers attacked Black composers like William Dawson for writing under the influence of Black idioms.W.E.B. Du Bois Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, UMass Amherst Libraries.White composers frequently earned praise for their music’s engagement with these idioms, which often included direct quotation. A critic for the magazine Musical America wrote, for example, that Powell’s “Rhapsodie Nègre” had a “savage, almost brutal polyphonic climax yielding gradually to a more peaceable slow section reared on a lyrical phrase with Dvorakian loveliness.” But white writers attacked Black composers like Florence Price and William Dawson for using similar approaches.When Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra performed Dawson’s “Negro Folk Symphony” at Carnegie Hall in 1934, another writer for Musical America wrote that “the influence of Dvorak is strong almost to the point of quotation, and when all is said and done, the Bohemian composer’s symphony, ‘From the New World,’ stands as the best symphony ‘à la Nègre’ written to date.”What was sophisticated and lovely when Powell did it was plagiarism when Dawson did.Dawson responded in The Pittsburgh Courier, a major Black newspaper, to defend his stylistic choices. “Dvorak used Negro idioms,” he said. “That is my language. It is the language of my ancestors, and my misfortune is that I was not born when that great writer came to America in search of material.”Over the decades, the “New World” steadily grew in popularity but never shed the aura of controversy surrounding its connections to Black music. A New York Philharmonic program annotator remarked in 1940 that “Dvorak, in his enthusiasm for Negro music, overlooked the fact that there exists in our diversified population a rich heritage of folk music brought hither by white colonists.” Around the same time, Olin Downes of The New York Times called the origin and inspiration of the symphony “a question for academic argument.”For many Black musicians, though, the “New World” was galvanizing precisely because of its ties to the African diaspora. In June 1940, a little over a year after the release of Billie Holiday’s anti-lynching protest song “Strange Fruit,” Artur Rodzinski and the New York Philharmonic premiered Still’s heart-rending “And They Lynched Him on a Tree.” A somber English horn solo early in the piece recalled the famous “New World” Largo, which directly preceded it on the program.A New York Philharmonic program from 1940 included the text for William Grant Still’s “And They Lynched Him on a Tree.”New York Philharmonic Leon Levy Digital ArchivesAfter Rodzinski discouraged the violinist Everett Lee from auditioning for the Philharmonic because of his race, Lee formed one of the nation’s first racially integrated orchestras, the Cosmopolitan Symphony Society, and became its conductor. During its third season, in 1951, he programmed Dvorak’s Ninth, which he would later direct at engagements around the world in an illustrious career spanning nearly seven decades.At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, in the mid-1960s, a group that included the conductor Benjamin Steinberg and the composer Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson founded another major integrated orchestra in New York called the Symphony of the New World — an optimistic nod to Dvorak. When Everett Lee returned from Europe to conduct the group in 1966, his program included its namesake, and his favorite: the “New World” Symphony. And the piece has remained a staple in the repertoire of many other prominent Black conductors, including A. Jack Thomas, Rudolph Dunbar, Dean Dixon, Jeri Lynne Johnson, Thomas Wilkins and Michael Morgan.Over the last 50 years, the “New World” has become perhaps the keystone in epochal American orchestral concerts abroad, including the Philadelphia Orchestra’s 1973 tour of China and the New York Philharmonic’s trip to North Korea in 2008. But ensembles have rarely paired it with pieces by living composers of color; instead, Dvorak alone becomes the international spokesman for the whole multiracial American experience.Everett Lee conducted the “New World” at engagements around the world in an illustrious career spanning nearly seven decades.New York Philharmonic Leon Levy Digital ArchivesThat should change. To start, organizations should reject the uncritical valorization of white composers of the past who appropriated Black or Indigenous musical styles — Dvorak, for example, or George Gershwin — as if programming their work comes at no cost to composers of color, past and present.Like Okoye. Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” has its strengths, but unlike it, Okoye’s deeply researched opera offers singers ample opportunity to engage with our national past while being liberated from the burden of embodying distorted stereotypes. Okoye’s evocative “Black Bottom,” premiered by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra at its annual Classical Roots celebration last March, is one of the most engrossing musical portraits of Black history in the available repertoire. (The performance was an especially memorable moment for an artist who attributes her decision to continue a career in composition in part to the Detroit orchestra’s tradition of inclusivity.)Beloved and moving, the “New World” Symphony has a secure place on programs well into the future. But Dvorak, and the white composers who followed in his footsteps, should not be the loudest voices speaking on behalf of all Americans.At the Detroit Symphony’s first Classical Roots celebration, in 1978, the conductor Paul Freeman programmed the “New World” alongside music by Hale Smith, William Grant Still and José Maurício Nunes Garcia — a rich musical cross-section of living and historical Black composers from diverse backgrounds. To continue reckoning with Dvorak’s legacy today, Detroit has commissioned a piece by James Lee III that will premiere alongside the “New World” next season. Lee’s work, “Amer’ican,” presents a lavish tapestry of musical images drawn from over six centuries of Indigenous and Black history.Lee said in an interview that he found it “quite gratifying” to join Dvorak in weaving Black and Indigenous musical materials into a work. According to the notes accompanying the piece, it closes with “music representing memories of unbridled freedom and exhilaration.”Lee added that his work had been set alongside Dvorak’s by other orchestras, but that in Detroit he would join a tradition of true creative dialogue between past and present.“Being programmed with the music of Dvorak is nothing new to me,” he said. “But this case is special.”Douglas W. Shadle is an associate professor of musicology at Vanderbilt University and the author of the book “Antonin Dvorak’s ‘New World’ Symphony.” More