Hilary Hahn’s album Eclipse features Dvořák’s spirited Violin Concerto. The violinist performed this tour de force from the Czech composer’s “Slavic period” in Frankfurt in April 2021.You can enjoy her captivating performance of the third movement (III. Finale. Allegro giocoso, ma non troppo) here.

Dvořák, a village butcher’s son raised in central Bohemia, incorporated the folk songs and dances he had heard as a boy in his mature musical language in defiance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s suppression of Czech culture and language. The Violin Concerto in A minor, Op.53, written between 1879 and 1882 for the great virtuoso Joseph Joachim, weaves folk-inspired themes typical of Dvořák’s Slavic period into the classical forms of sonata and rondo. It concludes with a stylized version of the furiant, a fiery Czech dance, part of what Hahn calls “a gigantic statement of human emotion.”