It is not just the city of his birth that connects the young podium star Andris Nelsons with the chief conductor of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. The Riga native has also been a private student of Maris Jansons for 10 years. By the time he was in his mid-30s, Nelsons had already conducted almost all the major orchestras in the world and is repeatedly traded as a potential successor to top-class chief conductor positions. Nelsons is a regular guest with the BR Symphony Orchestra. Andris Nelson’s first recording of symphonic works by Antonín Dvo ák is now available as a joint CD project. The focus of the CD is the recording of a concert from December 2010 in the Herkulessaal in Munich, where the symphony No. 9 from the New World was performed.
In an effort to give North American art music its own face and to break away from the predominant European style, the US National Conservatory commissioned the Czech Antonín Dvo ák to develop ideas for a genuinely American national style. An almost paradoxical task, but for which Dvo ák recommended himself as a sensitive virtuoso in dealing with regionally colored musical languages. With its themes from Bohemian folk music, which he implemented in a quasi American style characterized by pentatonic and syncopation and processed in the sense of the German-Austrian symphony, the symphony From the New World stood in the field of tension between three national styles. A recipe that has more than worked from its acclaimed premiere in New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1893 to this day.
Four years after Dvo ák’s last symphony, the Heldenlied was also the last of his five symphonic poems. Unlike before, however, he did without a concrete literary program, rather the composer had a spiritual hero in mind, an artist who celebrated the ultimate victory of the idea in the finale of the thoroughly composed sonata movement.
