Title : Antonín Dvorák: Slavonic Dances
Year: 1999
Genre : Classical
Conductor : Iván Fischer
Artist : Budapest Festival Orchestra

Description:

Iván Fischer is founder and Music Director of the Budapest Festival Orchestra. The partnership between Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra has proved to be one of the greatest success stories in the past three decades of classical music.

Whereas the first set had featured predominantly Czech dances (with the exception of the second which evoked the Ukranian dumka - not, strictly speaking, a dance), the second set is more broadly Slavonic, incorporating Slovak, Polish, Serbian and Russian elements in addition to Dvorák's favourite melancholy dumka strains.

In these sixteen highly varied and colourful dances, Dvorák had fulfilled his original brief to perfection, creating stylized, even idealized dance fantasias which intermingle folk elements with his own inspired melodies so effectively, so disarmingly and so artistically that for the most part they have defied attempts by musicologists to uncover the folk sources.

Dvorák justified his approach in 1894 : "From the rich stores of Slavonic folk music, in its Hungarian [ie Slovak], Russian, Bohemian and Polish varieties, the composers of the day have derived, and will continue to derive, much that is charming and novel in their music. Nor is there anything objectionable in this, for if the poet and painter base much of their best art on national legends, songs and traditions, why should not the musicians? "

8 Slavonic Dances, Op.46
01 . No.1 in C (Presto) 4:06
02 . No.2 in E minor (Allegretto scherzando) 4:45
03 . No.3 in A flat (Poco allegro) 3:51
04 . No.4 in F (Tempo di minuetto) 6:05
05 . No.5 in A (Allegro vivace) 3:15
06 . No.6 in D (Allegretto scherzando) 4:56
07 . No.7 in C minor (Allegro assai) 3:25
08 . No.8 in G minor (Presto) 4:11

8 Slavonic Dances, Op.72
09 . No.1 in B (Molto vivace) 4:13
10 . No.2 in E minor (Allegretto grazioso) 6:00
11 . No.3 in F (Allegro) 3:24
12 . No.4 in D flat (Allegretto grazioso) 4:45
13 . No.5 in B flat minor (Poco adagio) 2:41
14 . No.6 in B flat (Moderato, quasi minuetto) 3:32
15 . No.7 in C (Allegro vivace) 3:12
16 . No.8 in A flat (Lento grazioso, ma non troppo, quasi tempo di valse) 6:44



Issued: USA | Decca
Duration: 1:10:25