Dvorak

I remember when I listened to the Dvorak Cello Concerto for the first time. I was driving back from school, and a good friend of mine (a cellist) had just given me a CD of some of her favorite cello pieces. I listened to the whole thing (other personal favorites included Villa-Lobos' Bachianas Brasileiras and excerpts from sonatas by Brahms and Shostakovitch (I forget which ones at the moment)), and the Dvorak took up the last three tracks the CD. I remember I got about 3/4 of the way through the first movement (probably to just after that awesome double-stop gliss climax) and I remember thinking something along the lines of "holy crap." There's a way that music can make me feel sometimes that's unlike almost anything else, where it's just incredible and I'm so utterly caught up in it that I don't know anything except the music right then. Like I'm just on the edge of something huge and vast and utterly, potently unknown, and I didn't know that music could do that or sound like that or even that that kind of feeling was possible. When it kind of expands the range of feeling I could have, the scope of experiences that I knew existed and makes we want to go do something, anything, to create anything that could match that level of pure experience.

I restarted the track and really listened this time, the whole thing straight through. When it got to the climax of the third movement, and there are those three descending notes on the cello, and on that last note the entire horn section just rises up out of nothing to build this vast architecture of rising chords, I was so taken in and utterly floored. Right after that, the piece seems like it should close, but just as it sounds like it could maybe resolve and fade, the cello holds that seeming last note and suddenly the chords shift beneath it and you know the piece isn't done. When a lot of pieces do that I think to myself "just finish already" and wish the composer was a little less committed to following the classical structure of composition and would just satisfyingly end the damn piece, but when that chord shifted in the Dvorak I was like I just don't care, I'll follow this piece wherever it's going to lead me. It seemed utterly inevitable that it wouldn't be over yet, that there was still more to come because the whole piece was such a heroic/triumphant/nostalgic struggle and had such a sense of personality that it was like a person and couldn't end yet because that's not how people end, with resolution and when it sounds like it should.

That's such an overblown romantic notion, but I think that it's really a testament to the success of this piece that I never doubted its romance. How that the cello holds, before the horns rise up, the way that that note is held through the first swell of chords by the brass so that when they release and prepare for the second chord, the cello is still defiantly holding out on that one vibrating refuge of a note. This is where the Rostropovich and du Pre recordings are different for me- du Pre holds, but Rostropvich climaxes. Hers feels like the work of a spectacular artist who's trying as hard as she can, and it's incredible because it's so human, but his strains towards the inevitable in a way that speaks of human achievement rather than being human. The way he bites off the end of that last note, expending all of its last energy defiantly, and then gives way. He has to succumb eventually, but those extra seconds were worth everything.