“The Americans expect great things of me,’ Dvorák wrote in November 1892 to his friend Josef Hlávka, ‘and the main thing, so they say, is to show them the way to the promised land and kingdom of a new and independent art, in short, to create a national music.”
Dvorák’s years in the New World were, from an artistic point of view, unquestionably the most fertile of his entire career. In addition to the Ninth Symphony, he wrote there, among others, the Quartet Op.96 and the Quintet Op.97, the Biblical Songs, the Te Deum and the Cello Concerto. The Suite Op.98, which has only acquired the nickname ‘American’ in more recent times, was composed in the spring of 1894 for piano. A year later, shortly before returning to Prague, Dvorák arranged it for orchestra. Written when he was director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, it is an exotic patchwork of Amerindian and Afro-American music but with a pronounced Bohemian accent. In these superb performances by the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester led by James Gaffigan, both the charm and folk elements of these works are clearly in evidence. [text from Presto Classical]
