Mei-Ann Chen, conductor
Alisa Weilerstein, cello

Ching-Mei Lin: Song of Reverberant Emerald (commissioned by Hakka Affairs Council, world premiere)
Antonín Dvořák: Cello Concerto in B minor, Op.104
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Symphony No.4 in F minor, Op.36

Second of the four works inspired by Hakka culture this season is Song of Reverberant Emerald by Ching-Mei Lin, an associate professor at TNUA. The composition is derived from an ancient Hakka hill song “Damen tune” from Meinong, depicting the optimistic spirit of the Hakka people. Dvořák’s Cello Concerto, considered by many to be the greatest work in the genre, was written while the composer was living in America, but it is deeply imbued with passionate elements of his native Bohemia. Love, grief, crisis and destiny were favorite themes of the nineteenth-century Romantic composers, and nowhere in Tchaikovsky's life do they occur more dramatically than in the year 1877, the year in which he wrote his Fourth Symphony. It vividly reflects the traumatic events in the composer’s life at the time – involvement with a neurotic young music student whom he eventually married, with disastrous results, and the beginning of an extraordinary epistolary relationship with an older, wealthy patroness.