Cello Concerto / Symphony No.7

"Frans Helmerson produces the performance of a lifetime. with supercharged playing from the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra under Neeme Jarvi" (Classic CD)

Antonín Dvorák did not have an easy time with concerto form. Like his friend and champion Johannes Brahms, he was reproached more than once for writing concertos not for but against the soloist. His writing was found to be too orchestral and the complaint was made that the virtuoso had too little opportunity for appropriate display. 'The pianist is drowned in the work', wrote a soloist in his Piano Concerto in G minor, Op.33 (1876) whilst the legendary violinist Joseph Joachim said of the Violin Concerto in A minor, Op.53 (mostly composed in 1879-80) that, even after several revisions, it was 'not ready for public consumption […], principally because of the excessively orchestral, dense accompaniment, against which even the strongest playing could not make its presence felt'.
When, during his stay in America in November 1892, Dvořák received a request from his publisher Simrock for a 'beautiful and effective' piano concerto, he must have had mixed feelings. He started to sketch the work, but laid it aside to concentrate on the Ninth Symphony. In November 1894 he turned to the concerto project in earnest once again; in the meantime it had become a cello concerto. During his summer holidays in Bohemia that year he had met the cellist Hanu∫ Wihan, who was to be the dedicatee of the Concerto in B minor for Cello and Orchestra, Op.104, and this encounter led to his decision to change the solo instrument. (Dvorák had produced an early Cello Concerto in A major in 1865, which has only survived in a piano reduction.)
The new work, completed in 1895, was to be the last of Dvorák's concertos; it silenced his erstwhile critics and became one of the most popular works in the cello repertoire. Symphonic structure here gives way to a more concertante conception, although the orchestra is never demoted to the function of a mere accompanist. The solo part develops its extremely virtuosic material in an extrovert manner, without ever losing touch with its thematic roots. Nowhere is a soulless note to be found. This becomes apparent in the very first bars, which present the striking dotted-rhythm beginnings of the dark main theme, circling around one note, which is later joined by a transfigured, radiant theme in D major. The main theme permeates the entire development section and so, for reasons of formal economy, the recapitulation starts with the subsidiary theme, whilst the main theme does not return until the coda - and then it is in the major and, as the composer indicated, markedly 'grandioso', bringing to a glorious end a first movement that is as original as it is effective in conception.
Although it was composed in America (which becomes apparent from certain melodic phrases), this concerto is more reminiscent of Dvorák's Czech homeland. In the turbulent middle section of the elegiac G major Adagio, Dvorák quotes from his own song Laßt mich allein in meinen Träumen geh'n (Let me go alone in my dreams), Op.82 No.1 - a tribute to his beloved sister-in-law Josefina Kounicová, news of whose terminal illness reached him while he was writing the piece. The finale rises above such grief although, despite all its rhythmic energy, it retains an element of tragedy. The quotation in the Adagio was soon to become a funeral hymn: Josefina died in May 1895, and Dvořák added an epilogue to the finale in which the music ebbs away, again making use of the song motif. After this, the traditional major-key ending seems more like a passing quotation than a logical conclusion.
With its intermingling of absolute music and programmatic elements, the Cello Concerto demonstrates a compositional process that was to become increasingly important to Dvořák and which was to assign him a place between two stools in the æsthetic 'trench warfare' of the era. This did not worry him, however; he regarded himself not only as an 'absolute musician' (a view that the powerful music critic Eduard Hanslick was keen to share) but also, as he grew older, as a 'poet' - a tone poet who used musical means to portray characters and tell stories. To align himself unequivocally with the champions either of absolute music or of programme music would have meant the elevation of an abstract æsthetic theory to the status of a fundamental cornerstone of musical practice. Nonetheless, Dvorák was a practical enough musician to realize that clear distinctions could only be obtained on the drawing-board of reason, and plainly did not allow his musical curiosity to be tied down by the heated journalistic feuding of his contemporaries.
Before the composition of the seventh symphony, Dvorák had been influenced by both Wagner and Liszt, a fact which had represented itself in the over-use of monothematicism and excessive broadness in for example the E flat major symphony (No.3), and also by Brahms, who had provided Dvorák with tangible support. The influence of Brahms may also be discerned in relation to Dvorák's creative life and the D minor symphony (No. 7) in particular. Written in 1884-85 after Brahms's third symphony, it has a spareness and severity uncommon to Dvořák, and a progressive introduction of increased tone colour hitherto unknown in Dvorák's orchestral works. Yet this work is no mere act of homage to another composer, be it Johannes Brahms or Ludwig van Beethoven (for it must not be forgotten that the symphony was written in response to a request from the London Philharmonic Society, which had commissioned the latter's final symphony). It is a prime example of absolute music, but no music, even absolute music, can be divorced from the character of its creator - hence the struggles and emotions of the D minor symphony.

The Seventh Symphony is in four movements. The first, Allegro maestoso, is sober and establishes the general mood of the whole work. Melancholy and resignation predominate and the movement completes a circle as its principal theme fades away on the horns and cellos, exhausted. Intimacy and passion colour the second movement, Poco adagio. Some of Dvorák's earlier association with monothematic material may be discernible. The main theme on the flutes and clarinets grows initially out of the introductory clarinet theme with ultimate naturalness, but it is perhaps the romantic central horn theme - the warmest colouring in the symphony - which resonates in the mind. The third movement - Vivace - opens with a dance-like theme on the violins and violas which becomes increasingly aggressive and agitated. Indeed the scherzo sections of this movement have a wild syncopated quality which contrasts markedly with the pastoral trio, which is both yearning in its dialogue between violins and flute and also direct.
Uncompromising, the finale - Allegro - is launched by a variant of the second subsidiary theme of the first movement. Although this theme has similarities with the nationalist Hussite Overture, which Dvorák had written in 1883, there is no empty nationalistic bombast: rather this is the prelude to individual triumph which enables Dvorák, as a Czech, to introduce on the flutes in the second subject an expressive tune reminiscent of the music of his native land.
Text: Horst A. Scholz / Mark Hutchinson