Alla Zingarese:
A Winter Dance Festival Inspired by Eastern European Folk Music
Saturday, January 21, 8 pm, Sunday, January 22, 3 pm
Music by Brahms, Dvorak, Kreisler, and Bartok
- Ian Scarfe, artistic director and piano
- Roy Malan, violin
- Philip Brezina, violin
- Polly Malan, viola
- Erin Wang cello
“Classical” composers are never immune to the “popular” music surrounding them. This program celebrates several of the greatest composers of the Romantic era and the lively folk music that inspired them.
Brahms wrote his Hungarian Dances while still in his twenties and trying to make a career; Dvorak wrote his Slavonic Dances as a Bohemian response to Brahms’ success. Bartók spent years studying the folk music of Romania, and integrated that style into his own musical language in his Romanian Dances. Kreisler’s La Gitana is a picture of the gypsy violinist, as is his arrangement of Dvorak’s Songs my Mother Taught Me.
The program will conclude with one of the great masterworks of chamber music: Dvorak’s Piano Quintet in A Major, Op. 81. This epic work is flavored throughout with folk-inspired melodies and dances, including the Ukrainian Dumka and Czech Furiant, and, to cap things off, a rollicking Polka.
