Czech Language

This program is a continuation of the two previous CD-projects with Czech music, "Whispering Leaves" (COBRA0069) and "Fenetre sur le jardin" (COBRA0070). This time the theme is Christmas ("Vanoce"), again with a number of world premieres of beautiful music which have been unjustly forgotten.

Six-time GRAMMY®-Award winner, and 34-time nominee, Vince Mendoza returns to his roots as a composer and conductor highlighting collaborations with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, soprano Julia Bullock, guest artists Joshua Redman, Antonio Sanchez, Derrick Hodge, and The Roots’ premier MC Black Thought—for his forthcoming album, Freedom Over Everything, on Modern Recordings.

Robert Schumann started his career as a composer of piano music and Lieder, and is still best known for his work in these genres. Intimidated by Beethoven’s legacy, as well as by his friend Felix Mendelssohn’s prolific output, Schumann long avoided the symphony. Spurred by his wife Clara, who was convinced that his imagination could not find sufficient scope on the piano, he eventually ventured four highly original symphonies. While the First (“Spring”) and Third (“Rhenish”) display a typically German-Romantic predilection for the picturesque, the Second bears the fruit of Schumann’s study of Bach counterpoint, while the solemn and sombre Fourth seems to provide a hint of the composer’s troubled state in the final years of his life. The works are presented here in an excellent performance by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Lawrence Foster.

In 1924 there occurred an extraordinary coincidence: George Gershwin composed his Rhapsody in Blue and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote his third novel The Great Gatsby. Gershwin’s score was bright, tuneful and optimistic. Fitzgerald’s novel was brilliant, funny and sad. Both defined the 1920’s as what Fitzgerald dubbed “The Jazz Age”. I knew and loved both book and music from a very early age. I had an opportunity to express this when in 2019 the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre commissioned a new score for a ballet based on the novel. I wanted this ballet to sound like an expensive Broadway musical of the period: a small group of strings but plenty of saxes, pinging brass and holding it together that jazz beat and the throb of the Blues, but I also had a story to tell and characters to delineate. The novel darts about in time, only gradually revealing Gatsby’s story. In choosing selections for concerts and CD, I chose to mix it up and look for a musical logic. I also wanted to pay tribute to the popular dances of the day: sentimental waltzes, the Argentine tango and Paso Doble, Foxtrots and above all, the Charleston but central to the book is the classic love story of Daisy Fay and Jay Gatsby. What starts as a wartime romance in 1917 ends tragically with their reunion five years later.