Portland Chamber Orchestra - Best Buddies - with music by Antonin Dvorak

"Brahms seems to be pleased by his connection with me; and as an artist and a man I am so overcome by his kindness that I cannot help but love him. What a warm heart and great spirit there is in that man! You know how detached he is from even his closest friends, at least where his compositions are concerned, and yet he has not been like that to me". - Antonin Dvorak to Fritz Simrock

Dvorak treasured Brahms's friendship for the rest of his life. He was especially overwhelmed when Brahms voluntarily corrected Dvorak's proofs for Simrock while Dvorak was away in the United States. "In the whole world I do not think I could find another musician who would do the same," Dvorak wrote, and as tedious and time-consuming a job as proofing is, he was probably right. Brahms's death may have even been a contributing factor to Dvorak's remaining in Europe instead of returning to the United States.

Holistically, Dvorak pursued a clearly defined Romantic compositional style. His calculated, pleasant melodies, based on folk tunes, are the fundamental link with the emotions of a nation's people. Technical elements such as rhythm, articulation, and pulse provide further relationships with rural music. Variation of motives and orchestration allow different instruments to evoke specific emotions. Leon Janácek said of Dvorak's melodies "(they) were as if he had taken them from my heart."

Integral to the image of Dvorak in the populist philosophies of music history is the intense and fervent desire to create music influenced by Slavonic ethnicity. For the most part, this was catalyzed by a desire to celebrate the people and landscape of the country for which he had great affection. As he wrote in a letter to his publisher Simrock, he strongly believed that "an artist has his country in which he must have firm faith and an ardent heart."

The essence of the Czech homeland, and indeed therefore the Romantic style, is in no place more richly celebrated than Dvorak's Czech Suite, a five-movement work for orchestra which, although frequently left in the shadow of the composer's more popular works, portrays the character of that great nation affectionately.

Musically, the Suite provides little challenge to the ear. It is as listenable as a pop tune or Mozart piano concerto, but contains none of the innate symmetry and proportion common in the abovementioned. Instead, Dvorak's lilting themes, brings to mind the unpredictability of the European countryside. The style known now as 'Czech' incorporates unique patterns of modulation, rhythms, and other fundamentally distinctive elements which are obvious in this work, and easily recognizable to the uninformed listener.

The nationalistic idiom, despite its popularization, is truly tapped by this Suite. A link with the common people, so frequently an aspect of Romantic composers' lives, allowed Dvorak to extend emotional sentiment to the commoners as well as the emerging middle class. Generations have experienced life from Slav eyes through the great warmth and emotion of the Czech Suite. Its emotional importance is the vital idea, which causes it to be one of Eastern Europe's most well loved Romantic works.