The use of cameras or recording equipment during the 

performance is not allowed. Please be sure that cell phones,

pagers, and other electronic devices are turned off.

Music Department

National Gallery ofArt

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue nw

Washington, DC

www.nga.gov

cover: Julia Margaret Cameron, A Minstrel Group, 1866, albumen print,

Collection ofCharles Isaacs and Carol Nigro

The Sixty-ninth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery ofArt

2,805th Concert

New York Chamber Soloists

Curtis Macomber and Emily Popham Gillins, violins

Ynez Lynch, viola

Adam Grabois, cello

Elizabeth Metcalfe, piano

with Robert White, tenor

Presented in honor of The Pre-Raphaelite Lens:

British Photography and Painting, 1848-1875

November 3, 2010

Wednesday, 12:10 pm 

West Building Lecture Hall

Admissionfree
Program

Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900)

Romance in G Minorfor Two Violins, Viola, and Cello (1859)

Sullivan 

Three Songs

Orpheus With His Lute (1863)

Let Me Dream Again (1875)

The Lost Chord (1877)

Frederick Delius (1862-1934)

Romancefor Violin and Piano (1889)

Edward Elgar (1857-1934)

Two Songs

Pleading (1908)

Is She Not Passing Fair? (1886)

Delius

Legendefor Violin and Piano in E-flat Major (1895)

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)

On Wenlock Edge for tenor, two violins, viola, cello, and piano (1909)

(Texts from A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman)

On Wenlock Edge

From Far, from Eve and Morning

Is My Team Ploughing?

Oh, When I Was in Love with You

Bredon Hill

Clun

The Musicians

NEW YORK CHAMBER SOLOISTS

An acclaimed ensemble of distinguished virtuosi performing diverse repertoire, New York Chamber Soloists has maintained a unique niche in the

chamber music world for more than five decades. The twelve-member

ensemble ofstrings, winds, and keyboard offers many works that are

seldom heard due to the unusual instrumental combinations for which they

were written. With more than 250 works in its repertoire, the group has

helped to expand the audience for chamber music. Its programming innovations have included “Paris in the ‘20s”; an American Classics program; the

complete Mozart horn concerti; and song cycles, cantatas, and operas from

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) to Hugh Aitken (b. 1950).

New York Chamber Soloists has added substantially to the catalog of

twentieth- and twenty-first-century chamber works, with compositions written

for it by Mario Davidovsky, Ezra Laderman, Mel Powell, Gunther Schuller, 

and twenty-one other notable composers. The group has also commissioned

works for children, including Ferdinand the Bull by Hugh Aitken, and compositions based on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Gerald Fried and

Tania French.

The ensemble has completed eleven tours in Europe and six in Latin 

America as well as numerous tours ofthe Far East and South Pacific. In

the United States, it has appeared frequently in New York City at Lincoln 

Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; in Washington at the Kennedy 

Center, the Library ofCongress, the National Academy of Sciences, and the

National Gallery ofArt; at major universities across the country from Boston

to Berkeley; and at the Caramoor, Mostly Mozart, and Sun Valley Festivals.

New York Chamber Soloists has been in residence at the Vermont Mozart

Festival every summer since its inception in 1974. It appears at the National

Gallery by arrangement with Melvin Kaplan, Inc., of Burlington, Vermont.

3
CURTIS MACOMBER

One ofthe most versatile soloists and chamber musicians performing in

public today, violinist Curtis Macomber is equally at home in repertoire

from Bach to Babbitt. As a member ofthe New World String Quartet from

1982-1993, he toured abroad and performed in many ofthe most prestigious concert series throughout the United States. He is the violinist of

Speculum Musicae and Da Capo, and a founding member ofthe Apollo Trio.

His most recent recordings include a solo recording (Casting Ecstatic) on

cri; the complete Grieg violin sonatas on Arabesque; and an all-Steve Mackey

recording (Interior Design) and the complete violin sonatas ofJohannes

Brahms for Bridge Records. Macomber is presently a member ofthe chamber

music faculty ofthe Juilliard School of Music, where he earned his bachelor

ofmusic, master ofmusic, and doctor ofmusical arts degrees as a student

ofJoseph Fuchs. Macomber is also on the violin faculty ofthe Manhattan

School of Music and has taught at the Tanglewood, Taos, and Yellow Barn

Music Festivals.

EMILY POPHAM GILLINS

Violinist Emily Popham Gillins has toured throughout the United States, 

Europe, Korea, and Israel as a soloist and collaborative chamber musician.

As first violinist ofthe Degas String Quartet and a member ofthe International Sejong Soloists, she has performed at the Library of Congress and

the Kennedy Center. Other collaborations include concerts at the Prussia

Cove International Musicians Seminar and the Aspen, Ravinia, and Taos

Music Festivals. She completed degrees from Indiana University and the

Juilliard and Manhattan Schools of Music, studying with Miriam Fried,

Robert Mann, and Sylvia Rosenberg. Gillins has served as assistant concertmaster ofthe Sarasota Opera Orchestra and as a faculty member ofthe

Summertrios Music Festival in Pennsylvania. She joined the New York

Chamber Soloists in 2008.

4

YNEZ LYNCH

An original member of New York Chamber Soloists, violist Ynez Lynch has

been a soloist with the Musica Aeterna Orchestra and the Festival Orchestra

of New York, performing at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Metropolitan Museum ofArt. She has performed with the Festival Winds and

appeared as guest artist with the American and Emerson String Quartets

and the Paris Piano Trio. She has performed in the chamber orchestra and

as viola soloist at the Casals Festival in Prades, France, and San Juan, Puerto

Rico. Lynch toured the United States and Europe as a member ofthe original

cast of New York Pro Musica’s production of The Play ofDaniel, which was

recorded by Decca. She has also recorded for cri and Nonesuch, and has

made many radio and television appearances in North America and Europe.

ADAM GRABOIS

Cellist Adam Grabois has a varied career not only as chamber musician,

soloist, teacher, and recording artist, but also as founder ofthe record label 

Reflex Editions. He recently performed at the Getty Center in Los Angeles,

the Metropolitan Museum ofArt and the Morgan Library in New York City,

and the National Gallery in Washington. He is the cellist ofthe Lile Piano Trio

and a member ofthe Finckel Cello Quartet. Past collaborations have included

performances with Menahem Pressler and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Educated

at Swarthmore College, Grabois studied with David Finckel and has taught

as his assistant. He recently joined the faculty of Kinhaven Music School.

ELIZABETH METCALFE

Pianist and harpsichordist Elizabeth Metcalfe made her solo debut with the

Toronto Symphony Orchestra at age twelve, and subsequently performed

with that orchestra throughout eastern Canada. Metcalfe has appeared as

piano and harpsichord soloist and as a chamber musician throughout the

United States, in repertoire ranging from seventeenth-century harpsichord

music to contemporary music for both piano and harpsichord. She was a

founding member ofthe University ofVermont Baroque Ensemble and the

Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble.

5
ROBERT WHITE

Tenor Robert White has sung in prestigious concert halls, opera houses,

and churches throughout the world, including Carnegie Hall and London’s

Westminster Abbey and Wigmore Hall. He has sung for five presidents of

the United States, the royal families of Great Britain and Monaco, and Pope 

John Paul n. White performs with major orchestras and in chamber music

series and recital tours throughout America, Europe, and the Far East. Fluent

in six languages, he sings an extensive repertoire ranging from baroque and

classical operas to twentieth-century composers. He has been a member of

the voice faculty ofThe Juilliard School of Music since 1992. In 2010 Juilliard 

honored him with the William Schuman Scholars Chair. In addition to his

position on the Juilliard voice faculty, White is a member ofthe Director's

Council ofthe New York City Opera.

6

Program Notes

THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD AND PRE-RAPHAELITISM

Several attempts at the regeneration ofChristian themes and religious meaning in the arts characterized the opening decades ofthe nineteenth century. 

In France rebellious students from the studio ofJacques-Louis David (1748 —

1825), known as the “Primitifs,” sought a pure and uncorrupted art based on

earlier “primitive” styles. In 1810 the Nazarenes, a loose artistic brotherhood

of German painters, settled in an abandoned monastery near Rome to revive

the spirit ofsuch artist/monks as Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi. By

the 1830s, such sentiments reached England, spearheaded by religious

reformer Cardinal Newman, leader ofthe Oxford Movement; the architect

Augustus Welby Pugin (1812-1852); and the painter William Dyce (1806-

1864), among others.

Aware ofthese earlier movements and efforts, a group ofyoung English

artists led by painters William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), Dante Gabriel

Rossetti (1828-1882), and John Everett Millais (1829-1896), attempted in

1849 to lead a reinvigorated attack against what they saw as the sad decline

ofWestern art that had begun with Raphael (1483-1520), whose style epitomized for them the formulaic, the artificial, and the false. Like the Nazarenes

and others before them, these artists looked back to a more innocent time,

when the truth ofpainting was embodied in its commitment to nature, fidelity

to the details ofthe visible world, and purity and sincerity of expression. In

1849, Hunt and Millais each exhibited a painting at the Royal Academy and

Rossetti at the Free Society Exhibition in London. Each painter signed his

work by name, followed by the mysterious initials “prb.” Hunt's contribution

was Rienzi (now in a private collection in England); Millais submitted Lorenzo

and Isabella (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool); and Rossetti exhibited The Girlhood ofMary Virgin (Tate Gallery, London). The subjects derived respectively

from fourteenth-century Roman history (and Bulwer-Lytton), the literature

of Keats, and Rossetti’s personal brand of Biblical narrative. Each painting

was meticulously painted in oil on a canvas primed in white. The works 

were distinguished by bright colors, sharp light, precise details, accuracy of

historical costume, and thoroughly researched decor.

7
The mysterious initials on each canvas went largely unnoticed until the

following year, when all three artists exhibited together at the Royal Academy 

in London. The organizers ofthe exhibition and many members ofthe public

turned against the three young artists, succumbing to the fear that “prb”

was an organized band ofrebellious artists who were determined to upset

the conventions ofsociety. The three artists’ works were subject to hostile

criticism in the press, including a scathing attack by Charles Dickens in his

journal Household Words (June 15,1850). The Pre-Raphaelite dream seemed

on the verge of being extinguished when Coventry Patmore (1823-1896), a

friend ofthe artists and a frequent contributor to the Pre-Raphaelite journal

The Germ, approached John Ruslcin (1819-1900) to solicit support for them.

Ruskin responded with four letters to the London Times in defense ofthe

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and a pamphlet titled Pre-Raphaelitism. This

marked a turning point in the fortunes ofthe original seven artists associated with the movement that included Rossetti’s brother William Michael, 

James Collinson, Thomas Woolner, and F.G. Stephens.

There would be later incarnations and stages ofthe movement in both

the visual arts and literature (dominated by the personality of Rossetti), and

the original circle would expand further to include Christina Rossetti (1830-

1894), Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893), Charles Collins (1851-1921), and most

notably Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) and William Morris (1834-1896).

This aesthetic Pre-Raphaelitism, as it is sometimes called, had far-ranging

implications for the subsequent history of European and American arts,

letters, music, and design.

The Pre-Raphaelites frequently turned to music for symbols of a more

innocent time, including harps, lutes, portative organs, and other instruments associated with the Renaissance in the imagery oftheir paintings

and photographs. Often concepts that were originally symbolic offemale

sanctity, such as Saint Cecilia at the organ, took on sensual overtones in PreRaphaelite hands. An example is Burne-Jones’s series, Le Chant d’amour

(1863-1877).

8

The National Gallery’s recently-opened exhibition The Pre-Raphaelite

Lens: British Photography and Painting, 3848-1875, is the first survey of

British art photography focusing on the 1850s and 1860s. The rich dialogue

between photography and painting during this period is examined in the

exhibition’s thematic sections on landscape, portraiture, literary and historical narratives, and modern-life subjects. The exhibition continues in the

Gallery’s photography galleries on the ground floor ofthe West Building

until January 30, 2011.

New York Chamber Soloists has selected music for this program that

was written when the issues raised by the Pre-Raphaelites were drawing

the attention of creative personalities in all ofthe fine arts. In Patience, or

Bunthorne’s Bride (1881), one ofthe satires that Arthur Sullivan created with

W. S. Gilbert (1836-1911), the libretto satirizes the Pre-Raphaelite tendency

to see working-class English women as the embodiment of pure beauty,

untainted by modern civilization, and to seek them out as models or wives

as Rossetti did with Elizabeth Siddal and William Morris with Jane Burden.

Patience also poked fun at the aesthetic dandy embodied by such real life

artists as James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), Oscar Wilde (1854-1900),

and Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909).

Frederick Delius and Edward Elgar are examples of Edwardian Englishmen who encountered the Pre-Raphaelite movement in their youth, but

outgrew it as they matured. By the time Delius married the artist and collector

Flelene Jelka Rosen (1868-1935) in 1903, the movement still enjoyed widespread popularity, but was out offashion among most art connoisseurs. The

Deliuses’ personal collection focused on artists who were modernists in their

time, among them Edvard Munch (1863-1944). However, among the many

artists who were associated with Grez-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau (where

the Deliuses lived from 1903 to 1934) > there were some who showed traces

of Pre-Raphaelite influence, such as Louis Weldon Hawkins (1849-1910),

Frank O’Meara (1853-1888), and William Stott (1857-1900).

9
The poetry Elgar chose for his song settings would have appealed to any

Pre-Raphaelite—“Will you come homeward from the hills of dreamland,

home in the dusk, and turn my night to day?” (Arthur Leslie Salmon, c. 1885);

“Is she not passing fair, she whom I love so well? On earth or sea or air, where

may her equal dwell?” (Louisa Stuart Costello, c. 1850). However, judging

from the numerous sketches and cartoons that Elgar left for posterity in

addition to his music, his taste in art veered more toward Honore Daumier

than toward Rossetti or Burne-Jones.

Ralph Vaughan Williams’ On Wenlock Edge comes from the first decade

ofthe twentieth century, a time in the composer’s life when he was still 

solidly rooted in Victorian and Edwardian culture. The poem is from A

Shropshire Lad, a cycle ofsixty-three poems published in 1896 by classicist

and poet A. E. Housman. In On Wenlock Edge, Housman speculates on

what life might have been like in ancient times, when the place where he 

walks (Wenlock Edge, a limestone escarpment in Shropshire) was a northern outpost ofthe Roman Empire. The poetry, like the paintings ofthe

Pre-Raphaelites, tries to recapture the mindset of an earlier and more

innocent time.

Notes on the Pre-Raphaelites by David Gariff, Lecturer, National Gallery ofArt

10

Next Week at the National Gallery ofArt

Terry Waldo, pianist, and Ensemble

“’T ain’t No Sin”

Ragtime and early American jazz

Presented in honor of

American Modernism: The Shein Collection

November 7, 2010

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

East Building Auditorium

Kate Egan, soprano

Marlene Batemen, mezzo-soprano

Juliana Osinchuk, pianist

Music by Beethoven, Schumann,

and other composers

November 10, 2010

Wednesday, 12:10 pm

East Building Auditorium
From Far, from Eve and Morning

From far, from eve and morning 

And yon twelve-winded sky,

The stuff oflife to knit me

Blew hither: here am I.

Now—fora breathI tarry 

Nor yet disperse apart—

Take my hand quick and tell me,

What have you in your heart.

Speak now, andI will answer;

How shallI help you, say;

Ere to the wind's twelve quarters I take my endless way.

In Valleys of Springs and Rivers

In valleys ofsprings and rivers,

By Ony and Teme and Clun,

The country for easy livers,

The quietest under the sun,

We still had sorrows to lighten,

One could not be always glad,

And lads knew trouble at Knighton

WhenI was a Knighton lad.

By bridges that Thames runs under,

In London, the town built ill, ‘Tis sure small matter for wonder

Ifsorrow is with one still.

And if, asa lad grows older,

The troubles he bears are more,

He carries his griefs ona shoulder

That handled them long before.

Where shall one halt to deliver 

This luggageI’d liefset down?

Not Thames, not Teme is the river,

Nor London nor Knighton the town: ‘Tis a a long way further than Knighton, A quieter place than Clun,

Where doomsday may thunder and lighten,

And little

‘t will matter to one.

Texts

New York Chamber Soloists with Robert White, tenor

November 3, 2010

On Wenlock Edge the Wood's in Trouble

A. E. Housman (1859-1936)

On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble

His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;

The gale, it plies the saplings double,

And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

'Twould blow like this through holt and hanger 

When Uricon the city stood:

'Tis the old wind in the old anger,

But then it threshed another wood.

Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman 

At yonder heaving hill would stare:

The blood that warms an English yeoman,

The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

There, like the wind through woods in riot,

Through him the gale of life blew high;

The tree ofman was never quiet:

Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.

The gale, it plies the saplings double,

It blows so hard, 'twill soon be gone:

To-day the Roman and his trouble

Are ashes under Uricon.

Oh, WhenI Was in Love with You

Oh, whenI was in love with you,

ThenI was clean and brave,

And miles around the wonder grew

How well didI behave.

And now the fancy passes by,

And nothing will remain,

And miles around they'll say that

I

Am quite myself again.
Bredon Hill

In summertime on Bredon 

The bells they sound so clear;

Round both the shires they ring them

In steeples far and near, A happy noise to hear.

Here ofa Sunday morning 

My love and

I would lie,

And see the colored counties,

And hear the larks so high 

About us in the sky.

The bells would ring to call her

In valleys miles away: “Come to church, good people;

Good people, come and pray.

”

But here my love would stay.

AndI would turn and answer 

Among the springing thyme, “Oh, peal upon our wedding,

And we will hear the chime,

And come to church in time.”

But when the snows at Christmas

On Bredon top were strown,

My love rose up so early

And stole out unbeknown 

And went to church alone.

They tolled the one bell only,

Groom there was none to see,

The mourners followed after,

And so to church went she,

And would not wait for me.

The bells they sound on Bredon,

And still the steeples hum. “Come all to church, good people,

”—

Oh, noisy bells, be dumb; I hear you, I will come.

Is My Team Ploughing “Is my team ploughing,

That

I was used to drive

And hear the harness jingle

WhenI was man alive?”

Ay, the horses trample,

The harness jingles now;

No change though you lie under 

The land you used to plough. “Is football playing 

Along the river shore,

With lads to chase the leather,

Now

I stand up no more?”

Ay, the ball is flying,

The lads play heart and soul;

The goal stands up, the keeper 

Stands up to keep the goal. “Is my girl happy,

That

I thought hard to leave,

And has she tired ofweeping 

As she lies down at eve?”

Ay, she lies down lightly,

She lies not down to weep:

Your girl is well contented.

Be still, my lad, and sleep. “Is my friend hearty,

Now

I am thin and pine,

And has he found to sleep in A better bed than mine?”

Yes, lad,I lie easy,

I lie as lads would choose; I cheer a dead man's sweetheart, 

Never ask me whose.