Aaron Rabushka "brags"

>I probably have more copies of the New World Symphony than I do of any
>other piece of music.  Kubelik/Chicago, Neumann/some Czech orchestra,
>Karajan/Berlin, Golschmann/Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Talich/some Czech
>orchestra, Rozhdestvensky/some Russian orchestra,....not a sour apple in
>the bunch.  Go for any of them.  (If they were not still in boxes from
>last year's move I'd have more specific information on them all.)

If all the Talich (with the Czech Philharmonic) means to you is as good as
all the others, than either he falls far below his 7th and 8th performances
or you haven't listened.  I don't have his "New World." Dvorak can give
me problems.  His music is too "classic" for romanticism, unlike Smetana.
But that may be the way Dvorak is played.  Talich gives the 8th (which I
consider a better symphony than the 9th) an excitement and genuine earthy
quality often missing in a composer who is rendered very academically and
sounds too much like Tchaikovsky.  But Talich shows in fact how close
Dvorak is to Smetana.  And that is all to the good.  Smetana, I think, is
the better composer, although having begun to absorb the great 7th
symphony, I am no longer so sure.

And I couldn't agree more with Schwartz.  The Fiedler is one of the truly
great "New World" recordings.  If you shrugged Fiedler off as just a
"pop" conductor, you are in for a surprise.  Here he conducts the Boston
Symphony.  Ozawa should do an eighth (fraction not symphony) as good.

BTW, there is a close connection between Dvorak and Smetana and Nielsen.
Nielsen wrote a Danish-Bohemian Overture and his operas have Smetana's
comic opera quality.  Danish even begins to sound like Czech as you hear
so much of the shared tradition in the two music strains.  Both should have
been nationalistic, but because their composers are geniuses, the music of
these small countries turns out to be every bit as universal as any great
German or French composer.

Andrew Carlan
Standing up for Nielsen