NEW YORK – The American Symphony Orchestra performs Dvořák’s Requiem in Carnegie Hall, enthralling a full house with music performed by superb vocal soloists, the ASO, and the renowned Bard Festival Chorale.
The Largo creates a virtual world within itself through its formal structures, expressing feelings associated with nostalgia, homesickness, death, and a yearning for the afterlife and, perhaps, better times. According to Anton Seidl, conductor of the NY Philharmonic Society orchestra for the 1893 world premiere of the work at Carnegie Hall, “it is not a good name, New World Symphony — it is homesickness, home longing (Biancolli 1947, 240).”
