The popular wisdom regarding Anton Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, commonly known as the “New World Symphony”, is that it was the great Czech composer’s response to his three years in the United States toward the end of the 19th century. Otto Tausk doesn’t necessarily disagree, but his take on that relationship deviates sharply from musicological orthodoxy, which holds that African-American melodies and Indigenous rhythms are laced through Dvořák’s score.

“I’ve never felt the piece to be North American, somehow,” the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s recently installed music director tells the Straight, in a telephone interview. “I’ve always had the impression the piece was very much Bohemian, actually. So the whole idea that this ninth symphony was somehow based upon music he discovered… Somehow I don’t feel that connection. I feel the connection to folk music or folk tunes, but more folk tunes from his home country, which he wanted to go back to.”

There’s musicological evidence for Tausk’s suspicion. It seems that the spiritual “Goin’ Home”, which many claim was the inspiration for the second movement of the Symphony No. 9, was actually written by one of Dvořák’s American students, Williams Arms Fisher, many years after his teacher had returned to Prague. In his published comments on the song, Fisher owns up to borrowing Dvořák’s melody, alludes to his mentor’s homesickness, and points out that the original composition is “a moving expression of that nostalgia of the soul all human beings feel”.

The Netherlands-born, Amsterdam-based Tausk is quick to dispel any notion that he might be reconsidering his decision to make Vancouver his second home. “I’m really enjoying my time here!” he stresses. “But I do recognize the feeling of the mother tongue being something that you carry with you wherever you go, wherever you live, and whoever you work with. You always have this inside of you, somehow. So the idea is to find that inner voice, that folk-music voice, and Dvořák really succeeds in that.”

What the conductor calls “one of the best symphonies ever written” is not the only reason for listeners to make the pilgrimage to the Orpheum this weekend. Also in the program are Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings—made famous when the VSO’s 1970 recording of the work was used in Oliver Stone’s iconic antiwar drama Platoon—and Luciano Berio’s rarely performed Folk Songs.

The Berio piece—a cycle of American, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Sicilian, and French folk songs, with two original Berio compositions in a faux-folk style—was written for the composer’s then wife, the revered mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian. Here, it will be sung by Dawn Upshaw, herself a noted breaker of genre boundaries.

Thanks to his thorny, complex Sequenza series, Berio is known—in North America, at least—as a composer of demanding technical workouts. In Folk Songs, however, he’s surprisingly faithful to his rootsy sources, and the work is remarkable for its willingness to set aside the conventions of modernist composition for a much more direct form of address.

“It’s very tonal,” Tausk says, hinting at a link between the Berio, the Barber, and the Dvořák. “It’s even more accessible than a lot of classical masterworks, in a way, because it’s so recognizable. It’s like you can almost sing the tunes, even if you don’t know them. It’s very brilliantly orchestrated.”

Upshaw, he continues, “is in a way the Cathy Berberian of our time. I mean, she’s done everything from baroque to contemporary; she’s also done musical theatre, she’s done opera. She’s such a multifaceted singer, like Berberian, so I’m really, really happy that she’s coming to sing the Berio songs with us.”

Dawn Upshaw joins the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra at the Orpheum from Friday to Sunday (October 18 to 20).