Dvorak: "From the New World", 2nd movement

My beloved grandmother, Berta Hopfner, is not very well: she is almost 91 years old, and now had three strokes within a short time. Her all-time favorite music is the Second movement from Antonin Dvorak's Symphony no.9: "From the New World". Everytime when I visited her, she asked me to play this piece (in my own improvisatory way) on the piano or on the organ.

To make her a joy and to cheer her up in her present condition, I decided yesterday that I would take that old MIDI file which I had made of this music 15 years ago, and would turn it into a recording with the new MAESTRO-2 system. It took me 13 hours to do this. Was not too difficult, the main work had already been done: getting all the notes into the file. I even did not change the tempo much: my rendition from 1995 was already up to my current standards. I had to edit new expression curves, and used some of the specific samples from the GPO-4 set (trills for strings, for example).

Now the music rendition is completed, and I already uploaded it to the web site. I did not yet make a special page for it, just placed it into the file collection.

The latest recording of this music is available here at www.virtualphilharmonic.co.uk/Dvorak_S9M2.php.

My grandmother is the only one in our family who has some significant musicality: she played piano and taught many students in Iphofen how to play this instrument, until a few years ago. Both my parents do not exhibit a significant musicality strain, so I must have gotten the music bug from her only. I hope that listening to this music will bring her into good spirits.