Dvořák’s three-year stint in the United States during the 1890s had a huge impact on that young nation’s musical heritage, inspiring generations of composers to write for the concert halls and opera houses. It also produced some of his best-loved pieces including, of course, From the New World and his twelfth string quartet, ‘American’, and it was a string orchestra arrangement of this work that Richard Tognetti chose for the close of the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s season.

Richard Tognetti on electric violin in ACO’s The American. Photo © Nic Walker

For his US cultural tour Tognetti chose works by three living and three dead composers.

Bryce Dessner, guitarist and founding member of the rock band The National, taps into his Jewish heritage for his work Aheym, Yiddish for “homeward”, dedicated to his grandmother Sara who would tell him stories of how the family emigrated from Russia and Poland.

This “evocation of the idea of flight and passage” made for a powerful opening, with its urgent beat giving way to a looping passage driven by the cellos with fiddles folding around a syncopated ground bass, giving the impression of wheels in motion.

Pianist-composer George Walker...