Waltzes, Op. 54 & Mazurkas, Op. 56

Dvorak's Waltzes and Mazurkas prove to be a successfully contrived balancing act between stylized composition and musical immediacy. The music critic Louis Ehlert once wrote of Dvorak s Slavonic Dances that they "made a real musician's heart laugh within him." The comment might equally well be applied to these pieces. These Waltzes and Mazurkas rank along side the best works of Chopin in terms of artistic merit, yet they are not widely known and have not been heard as often in concert halls as they deserve. The Urtext version of these dances is published for the first time in this edition.