Max Culver, strings winner of BBC Young Musician 2018, joins Suffolk Philharmonic for Dvorak's Cello Concerto in a concert of Bohemian masterpieces that looks forward in hope to life beyond covid.
The concert begins with Smetana’s overture to his opera The Bartered Bride, an eccentric romp culminating in breathless suspense. The bullet-train of operatic overtures, this is fleeting and highy energised, rollicking on its way, and demands nothing short of virtuosic playing from every musician. It is, quite simply, very, very fast.
This is followed by the glorious playing of Max Calver, who won the string section of the 2018 BBC Young Musician competition. His rendering of Dvorák’s Cello Concerto will leave you in no doubt that he has a brilliant future ahead.
The concert concludes with another Dvorák masterpiece, his 9th Symphony 'From the New World'. Written, like the Cello Concerto, during the composer’s brief period living and working in New York, this firmly placed North American music on the map and established Dvorák’s reputation as a genius.
These two great masterpieces from Dvorak's time in America have a very different thumbprints from each other. The New World Symphony, whilst not without its more reflective moments, seems to bask in transatlantic sunshine and celebrate the characteristic intonations and tones of voice of the New World. The Cello Concerto, on the other hand, whilst not without its moments of triumph and glory, it shot through with a deep yearning for a return, a yearning rich with the intonations of the composer's native land: a longing, a sadness, a desire for the embrace of home.