Today’s concert celebrates diversity through dance, at each stage involving a symphonic “take” on an exotic import. Thus, we have Dvorák’s take on the Polish mazurka and polka, Chen Yi’s take on a Chinese village dance, Adam del Monte’s take on Spanish flamenco, and Bizet’s take on Spanish-derived dance traditions.

Having undertaken publishing the then-unknown Antonín Dvorák’s Moravian Duets as a favor to his esteemed client Johannes Brahms in 1877, the publisher Fritz Simrock soon realized he had hold of a good thing. He immediately commissioned a set of Slavonic Dances from the Bohemian composer, which he imagined—rightly—might repeat the popular success of Brahms’s Hungarian Dances a decade earlier. Like the Brahms set, Dvorák’s were originally published as piano duets, but proved so popular that he immediately set about orchestrating them, and almost overnight (after languishing for years in obscurity) Dvorák became an international success. Then began a long struggle on the part of Simrock to get him to compose (and orchestrate) a second set, a process of persuasion that in the end devolved into outright coercion. The resultant two sets, although composed at very different stages in the composer’s career—completed in 1878 and 1887, respectively—and though wonderfully varied, have always seemed, somehow, cut from the same cloth. The present selection draws on both sets and two distinct national traditions, of Bohemia and Poland: Op. 46 No. 1 is a furiant, a favored type of the composer (cf. the scherzo of the Sixth Symphony, performed at our last concert), whereas Op. 72 No. 2 and Op. 46 No. 3 are Polish dance types, a mazurka and polka, respectively.

Chinese-born composer Chen Yi, now Distinguished Professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance, originally wrote the award-winning Duo Ye for piano solo (1984), before orchestrating it first for chamber orchestra (1985) and then for full orchestra (1987). She based the work on a village folk song and dance tradition, which she had observed a few years earlier in the Guangxi Zhuang region of China. Duo Ye develops the melody of the song while using the dancing rhythmic chorale as accompaniment, mixing in the styles of high-pitched mountain songs and Beijing opera tunes, and applying techniques from Shifan drum ensembles, among other elements, in order to create a blend of Chinese song and dance traditions.

Paisajes (Landscapes) is Adam del Monte’s second concerto for flamenco guitar. As the composer notes, “it is an ongoing exploration to meld the two very different worlds of traditional flamenco forms, rhythms, and melodies with the symphonic idiom.” And, because flamenco is an oral tradition, one particular challenge is to “orchestrate the nuances” of the style. Part of del Monte’s solution is to have the orchestra not only accompany, but at times also function “like a second giant guitar,” which involves harmonic voicing and a “guitaristic distribution of parts around the orchestra.” Paisajes follows some traditional aspects of the concerto form, but with an evolving thematic process across the three movements. As the composer relates, “each movement reflects the different landscapes of places that have deeply inspired me.”

While orchestral excerpts from many operas have achieved popularity, Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875) seems a special case, achieving success not only with stand-alone excerpts but also with a variety of arrangements into multi-movement suites and virtuoso transcriptions. The opera’s appeal in this regard is undoubtedly due largely to the dance rhythms used in many of its arias (such as the Habanera), and the fact that its introductions and entr’actes are self-standing orchestral gems in themselves. The Carmen Suite No. 2 consists of seven numbers, launched by the opening prelude (with its famous “flower” theme), and offering a shifting palette of dances, marches, and songs. As is often true in opera, the exotic element of Carmen is not authentic, but based rather on what Bizet’s Parisian audience would have taken to be representative of Spain. Thus, the famous Habanera is actually an Afro-Cuban type (the term literally means “Havana-style”) with English and French roots—in this case based on a specific song written by a Spanish composer who is trying to sound Cuban.