Program

Water Night (1995)                                                            Eric Whitacre (b. 1970)
arr. John Wiebe

String Quartet No. 1 (1967)                                              Peter Paul Koprowski (b. 1947)
I. Antecedent
II. Consequent

Piano Quartet No. 2 in A. Op. 81                                     Antonín Dvořák (1841 – 1904)
II. Dumka: Andante con moto
                                                     Clark Bryan, piano

Sinfonia for String No. 2 in D, (1821)                              Felix Mendelssohn (1809 – 1847)
II. Andante
III. Allegro vivace

                                                           Intermission

String Octet in E-flat, Op. 20                                            Felix Mendelssohn (1809 – 1847)
I. Allegro moderato con fuoco
II. Andante
III. Scherzo. Allegro leggierissimo
IV. Presto

The core group of the Rebelheart Collective consists of highly trained professional musicians. The group is flexible in size depending on the project. Other members include high-level student and graduates who want to work on building careers as a professional orchestral musician and community activist. They combine classical repertoire with new music, engaging with composers and collaborators from varied backgrounds.

For the season finale, Executive & Artistic Director Clark Bryan will join the Rebelheart Collective for Dvořák’s Piano Quintet Op. 81 entitled “Dumka.”

“Dumka” which is a form that Dvořák famously used in his Dumky piano trio and features a melancholy theme on the piano separated by fast, happy interludes. It follows the pattern ABACABA where A, in F♯ minor, is the slow elegiac refrain on piano with variations, B is a bright D major section on violins and C is a quick and vigorous section derived from the opening refrain. Each time the Dumka (A) section returns its texture is enriched.

Whether a question of the choice of thematic material, the superb instrumentation or the flawless structure of the individual movements, the quintet is, in all respects, an exemplary achievement of Dvorak’s proficiency as a mature composer. Here, he effectively incorporates nuances of Slavonic music, particularly in the melancholic dumka in the second movement and in the virtuoso stylisation of the furiant, a Czech folk dance, in the third movement. Even so, this is not a work that could be described as exclusively “Slav”. At the peak of his career, Dvorak skilfully combines folk (or “national”) elements with “Pan-European” principles, thus achieving his own distinctive, convincing synthesis. A major part of the quintet was written at Dvorak’s summer residence in Vysoka, and it seems as though the idyllic atmosphere of this environment was projected into the music itself: this is a serene work radiating with prevailing optimism which, in the final two movements, intensifies to an expression of spontaneous joy.