Asheville – The Asheville Symphony Chorus (ASC) opens its 2023-2024 season with “On the Danube’s Shore: Music from Austria, Germany, Slovakia, and Hungary” on November 12, 2023, at First Baptist Church of Asheville. The concert, performed under the baton of ASC’s new, permanent Conductor, Kyle Ritter, will feature folk music and love songs from Béla Bartók, Johannes Brahms, Lajos Bárdos, plus organ music from Anton Heiller — four master composers linked by one of Europe’s most iconic waterways.
“While it wasn’t intentional at the start, as our program developed, we realized that — rather serendipitously — each of our composers was linked by this both real and metaphorical thread: the Danube River,” says Ritter, who served as Interim Conductor last season before assuming a permanent role with the chorus. “And you can hear that thread running from piece to piece. I couldn’t be more thrilled to present this multi-lingual celebration of folk song to our Asheville community.”
Beginning in Germany, the nearly 2,000-mile-long Danube passes through or borders the countries where all the featured composers lived and worked. “The Danube Valley had a thriving folk-music tradition for centuries,” says Ritter. “In some ways, it’s no surprise that the melodies and rhythms of these traditions made it into their music — or that these pieces were so popular with local audiences when they were first published.”
While Bartók, Bárdos, and Brahms all drew on the folk music of the Danube Valley to infuse their compositions with recognizable, popular motifs, for Bartók and Bárdos, folk music was more than just a device. Both men made it a central part of their life’s work to collect, catalog, and celebrate thousands of folk songs and dances that could have otherwise been lost to history.
Though Romanian by birth, Béla Bartók had a love for the Slovak people. On November 12, ASC will perform Four Slovak Folk Songs, published in 1924 — just four of the 3,500 Bartók and his colleagues spent years collecting. Little known fact: On the advice of his doctor, Bartók lived for a time in Asheville, enjoying the benefits of the mountain air and teaching at Black Mountain College during the winter of 1943-1944, shortly before his death.
In many ways like Bartók, who he knew and admired, the Hungarian Bárdos was influenced by his countryman, the composer and folk-music scholar Zoltan Kodaly. Like Kodaly, Bárdos made it a priority to collect and preserve Hungarian folk music, and in 1931 went as far as founding a publishing house to ensure this music would live on. ASC will perform two of his folk-inspired pieces, composed 30 years apart: Széles a Duna and Tábortűznél.
For German-Austrian Brahms, it was folk dance that served as inspiration for his collection of rather intimate love songs that form the core of ASC’s program. Liebeslieder Waltzer, Op. 52 marries the poetry of Georg Friedrich Daumer to the Ländler, a Swiss-Austrian dance style that was popularized by Franz Schubert. Though Brahms’ collection of waltzes premiered decades after the height of the Ländler, they were instantly and wildly popular with audiences.
“Brahms’ intention for these pieces was to have them performed in informal settings such as parlor concerts,” says Ritter. “But singing these pieces with a chorus our size really lends a sense of depth to the sound. It reminds me of when Robert Shaw recorded the Faure Requiem and the Duruflé Requiem with a group of two hundred or so. Those pieces were never intended to be sung by choruses of that size, but there’s a certain thrill in the sound that I think is really exciting.”
ASC will tap into that depth of sound when they perform 10 of the 18 songs in Brahms’ opus, accompanied by Tate Addis and Eric Kripke on piano.
Finally, fresh off a performance in Vienna, Austria celebrating the 100th anniversary of the composer’s birth, ASC Assistant Conductor Tate Addis will take the audience in a different and exciting direction with three pieces from highly influential Austrian composer and organist Anton Heiller. Written in 1957, In Festo Corporis Christi was the first of Heiller’s works inspired by Gregorian chant. Each of the lush, harmonically complex movements is an intonation for the propers for the Feast of Corpus Christi. Its popularity upon publication in 1960 further cemented Heiller as a giant of European composition in the second half of the 20th century. As part of the program, Addis will also present Heiller’s Partita “Vater unser im Himmelreich” and Fantasia super ‘Salve Regina.’
Asheville Symphony Chorus will perform “On the Danube’s Shore: Music from Austria, Germany, Slovakia, and Hungary,” at First Baptist Church of Asheville on November 12, 2023, at 7 pm.
Ticket Information
Tickets start at $27 for adults and $16 for youth, and are available for advance purchase at www.ashevillesymphonychorus.com/concerts and at the door shortly before the performance.