Intersecting Echoes from the New World

In his magnum opus, the Symphony “From the New World,” Dvořák combined elements of his individual melodic and rhythmic discourse with American folk music. One of these intersectional musical themes was also taken up by British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor in his Hiawatha Overture, a suspenseful work with Romantic inflections inspired by a poem by Henry Longfellow. British composer Hannah Kendall depicts the lives of Matchwomen in a factory with her piece The Spark Catchers, premiered in 2017. The spark to illuminate this intersecting program is the OSM’s first-time guest conductor from Quebec, Mélanie Léonard.