Dear God, I meant to go to bed.
I'll admit to not even knowing about this work.
Like, let's be honest, all one really needs to know about Dvořák is #9, right? Call it "From The New World", call it "Aus der Neuen Welt", call it "Z nového světa", call it what you want. If it's not the greatest symphony ever written, it's really close. Seen it live twice.
Now, not to say:
1) Op. 104 is better than "From The New World"
2) Op. 104 didn't recycle multiple themes from "From The New World", because, yes, I can hear them
3) There is no third thing
Now, not to say any of the above things, this is ****ing great ****ing epic ****ing classic as ****. Yeah, it gets my ****ing vote. I poured another glass of scotch off a $100+ bottle just to finish listening to it, well after midnight.
Thanks, Antonín. Dear God, you were untouchable, weren't you?
"Of course, Paganini used to make an absolute stunt out of this and actually arrange for strings to break during the course of the performance, he would have them filed so they would cut through and then would dazzle the audience by performing the entire program on one string only, but of course you can't do that for the cello concerto written by Dvořák, you can only do it with a stunt piece in which the composer has this in mind in the first place..."
God in heaven and the droplet of sweat of the tip of Jaqueline's nose, that was amazing.