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Composer: Horowitz, Joseph

Composer: Beckerman, Michael

Hiawatha Melodrama (after A. Dvorak) (arr. A. Gil-Ordonez)

Deas, Kevin

Lyricist: Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Conductor: Gil-Ordonez, Angel

Post-Classical Ensemble

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Narrator: Deas, Kevin

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Playing Time: 00:08:47

Catalogue Number: NVF0097

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The Hiawatha Melodrama here recorded is a third and "final" version which Horowitz expanded to include excerpts from Dvorak's American Suite and Violin Sonatina. The objective has been to turn a demonstration arising from scholarly inquiry into a bona fide concert work. The narrative, extracted from Longfellow's poem, is no longer fragmentary but continuous: it tells the Hiawatha story, beginning to end. From the American Suite, Horowitz have extracted an elegiac Indianist refrain from the third movement and from the Sonatina he used themes from the Larghetto, which is a portrait of Hiawatha's wife Minnehaha. He also added transitional passages of his own. The orchestration, where not by Dvorak, it is by Angel Gil-Ordonez.

The Hunting of Pau-Pau-Keewis wherein the music is extracted from the finale of Dvorak's New World Symphony (a Berkerman alignment). Certain Longfellow lines are here sung. Berkerman comments: "While this at first may seem far-fetched, one must remember that as soon as he returned to Bohemia 1895, he composed a series of tone poems based on the ballads of K.J. Erben. In at least one of these, he set down the poem, line by line, beneath the music - so this process was not alien him."