Editorial Reviews : This, the first of Leonard Bernstein's two recordings of this symphony, is vastly superior to his remake on DG. It's a vital, impulsive performance, with a daringly fast tempo in the Scherzo, and a very satisfying culmination in the closing pages. It's simply another reminder of what a reliable, and above all musical, conductor Bernstein was. This mid-price series, called 'Bernstein Century,' is a real collectors' edition. Great stuff.
Buyer Reviews : Dvorak, in this symphony, invests his essential beliefs in music. He is in New York at the time, the director of the National Conservatory of Music. This symphony shows how Dvorak was able to integrate any influence from the country where he was. Here we can easily identify cross references to Native Americans, Afro-Americans, pioneers and frontier men, and their numerous songs and styles, set in a vast and breath-taking landscape and wilderness. He avoids the massive and majestic force that this immense and wild landscape could produce by injecting, at crucial moments and as essential musical developments that will come over and over again in the various movements, musical phrases and sentences that ring like Indian music, negro spirituals, frontier songs and many others, including some european themes that were brought over by european immigrants and probably by Dvorak's memory itself. It thus becomes a very varied and fascinating lacework of various sources and influences. It gives the real picture of what America is : a both ungoverned and elaborate patchwork of cultures and peoples who never lose their identities but rather bring them into the common bowl of the building of a new world. Some conductors may put the accent on the slavonic or bohemian origin of Dvorak. Some may put the emphasis on the key role this music will play in the emergence of a real American symphonic music. Yet we can always feel the coming of Gerschwin and Grofé and many others in those marvelous pages. This symphony is an essential work to understand the genesis of the American soul in music.
