The Case for Dvorak

Throwing his hands up in despair at an unanswerable question, Virgil Thomson once wrote that American music is nothing more or less than music written by Americans. But even that may not be a broad enough definition any longer. Wednesday night, the Pacific Symphony began an eight-day festival exploring the three years Dvorak spent as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City. And it proposed that the Czech composer and celebrated Bohemian nationalist wrote American music too.

Joseph Horowitz, the artistic advisor of the Dvorak in America Festival (the second in the Pacific Symphony’s annual explorations of an aspect of American music), claims that Dvorak’s “American” Suite, written in 1895, is so infused with the essence of our national style--with its adaptations of the cakewalk, the plantation song, Native American drumming--that it not only speaks our language but actually presages such later composers as Gershwin.

A compelling case for this was made on the opening program, which included performances of the suite in its original piano version, wonderfully played by Robert Thies as a prelude to the concert, and then enthusiastically performed in its orchestrated version conducted by Carl St.Clair.

But American musical life being what it is, the lure that attracted Wednesday night’s large and well-heeled crowd to hear three pieces composed in America in 1895 was the most famous Russian musician of our time, Mstislav Rostropovich, as soloist in Dvorak’s Cello Concerto.

Although written during his last year in New York and inspired by Victor Herbert’s Second Cello Concerto (which will be performed by the Pacific Symphony Wednesday and Thursday), Dvorak’s concerto has rarely been regarded as “American” (one Dvorak scholar, Michael Beckerman, is an exception).

And, in fact, over the past half century, this popular concerto has never thrived more than it has in the intensely emotional hands of the Russian cellist.

Rostropovich is now 75 and an icon. His birthday last month was an international occasion, and Rostropovich is still celebrating it with a touring schedule of solo performances and conducting engagements that would tire a man half his age. And maybe it is tiring even him, given that Rostropovich seemed, at least for him, subdued. His tone, of course, is no longer that of the young man who played like a god. And fast passages now, while still impressively fleet, display obvious effort. But on this evening there was a new hint of weariness as well.

In early recordings from the 1950s of this piece, Rostropovich poured out rapture as if from a bottomless pit. No longer suggesting such urgency, he now demonstrates his greatness in the many levels of melancholy he brings to the more lyrical themes. The deeply touching ending of the concerto was a moment of particular beauty, of tenderness exquisitely nuanced.

At his most eloquent, Rostropovich goes beyond interpretation and seems to embody the music itself. And he sustained such eloquence throughout an encore, a Bach sarabande, its final note fading off into transcendental silence, suggesting a world far away from Dvorak’s America.

Still, even Rostropovich’s performance of the Dvorak had something to say about America’s unavoidable culture clashes. Next to the seasoned Russian, St.Clair was the young, occasionally brash American.

Once or twice, he seemed eager to spur the cellist on, but mainly he demonstrated sensitive deference when the orchestra’s job was to accompany, waiting to whip it up into a showy storm when it was on its own.

For the first half of the program, however, St.Clair was there to sell the music all the way. The “American” Suite, which tends to sound more mellow in the hands of Czech conductors, was purposefully bright and outgoing. And St.Clair brought plenty of verve to a true rarity, George Chadwick’s “Jubilee,” which opened the concert.

This movement from Chadwick’s “Symphonic Sketches,” is an early and engaging example of an American composer dressing vernacular sources in conventional late 19th century symphonic cloth. It’s well done, if not nearly as distinctive as what Charles Ives would soon achieve.

But hearing it did an excellent job of piquing interest in what this fascinating festival intends as it unearths the neglected roots of our national musical character.

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The Pacific Symphony’s Dvorak in America Festival continues through April 25, with concerts and ancillary events at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. (714) 755-5799.