Program Note
The spirit of folk music, which is to say folk stylizations, since the melodies are inevitably his own, is at the heart of Antonín Dvorák’s mature compositions. In his Op. 90, the last of the great Bohemian’s four trios for piano, violin, and cello, he is both at his most original and his folksiest: even the formal layout is derived from the music of “the people” rather than from a classical style.
The subtitle of the Op. 90 Trio, “Dumky” (plural of dumka), describes the style of all six of its movements, a dumka being a Slavic (some sources state specifically Ukrainian) folk song marked by abrupt changes from doleful to exuberant. Tradition has it that pre-publication proofs were read by his good friend Johannes Brahms while Dvorák was in America.
—Herbert Glass