Jessica Cottis conducts Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony in a program shaped by America.
Australian composer Melody Eötvös’s The Deciding Machine pays tribute to 19th-century mathematician and writer Ada Lovelace and her work for an early computing machine, the Analytical Engine. She wrote it for Wyoming’s Grand Teton Music Festival in 2021 and it has since been performed in Australia, where Limelight described it as a ‘vividly layered composition that cleverly exploits different instrumental timbres for machine-like effects.’
Guest violinist Sophie Rowell joins CSO to perform Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto. Barber began writing the Concerto in Switzerland and France before returning home to the USA as World War II loomed, and it opens with lyrical beauty before culminating in a virtuosic moto perpetuo.
Dvořák wrote his Ninth Symphony, ‘From the New World’ on a visit to America at the height of his international career. He fused ideas inspired by music he heard there, particularly African American spirituals, with both the European symphonic tradition and the Czech music of his homeland. When the Symphony premiered at Carnegie Hall, the New York Evening Post wrote: ‘anyone who heard it could not deny that it is the greatest symphonic work ever composed in this country’.
PROGRAM
Melody Eötvös
The Deciding Machine
Samuel Barber
Violin Concerto
Antonín Dvořák
Symphony No.9, 'From the New World'
ARTISTS
Jessica Cottis: conductor
Sophie Rowell: violin
Canberra Symphony Orchestra