Dvořák's New World

Dvořák's New World

2027 Llewellyn Series
(Original Caption) 8/13/1925-New York, NY: Above is a striking photo showing a little immigrant family on the dock at Ellis Island, N.Y., just having passed the rigid examination for entry into the "land of promise" looking hopefully at New York's skyline while awaiting the government ferry to carry them on to the land of the free.

Jessica Cottis conducts Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony in a program shaped by America.

Australian composer Melody Eötvös’s The Deciding Machine pays tribute to 19th-century mathematician and writer Ada Lovelace and her work for an early computing machine, the Analytical Engine. She wrote it for Wyoming’s Grand Teton Music Festival in 2021 and it has since been performed in Australia, where Limelight described it as a ‘vividly layered composition that cleverly exploits different instrumental timbres for machine-like effects.’

Guest violinist Sophie Rowell joins CSO to perform Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto. Barber began writing the Concerto in Switzerland and France before returning home to the USA as World War II loomed, and it opens with lyrical beauty before culminating in a virtuosic moto perpetuo. 

Dvořák wrote his Ninth Symphony, ‘From the New World’ on a visit to America at the height of his international career. He fused ideas inspired by music he heard there, particularly African American spirituals, with both the European symphonic tradition and the Czech music of his homeland. When the Symphony premiered at Carnegie Hall, the New York Evening Post wrote: ‘anyone who heard it could not deny that it is the greatest symphonic work ever composed in this country’. 

 

PROGRAM

Melody Eötvös
The Deciding Machine

Samuel Barber
Violin Concerto

Antonín Dvořák
Symphony No.9, 'From the New World'

 

ARTISTS

Jessica Cottis: conductor 
Sophie Rowell: violin
Canberra Symphony Orchestra

When

Duration

Approximately two hours

Where

Accessibility

  • Wheelchair access

Ticket prices

Type Price
Premium $130 - 149
A-Reserve $120 - 136
B-Reserve $100 - 115
C-Reserve $70 - 79
* Transaction fee will be applied
This concert is currently only available as part of a CSO subscription. Single tickets will be available from 5 November 2026.