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Music Department

National Gallery of Art

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue nw

Washington, DC

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Landover, md 20785

www.nga.gov

cover: Paul Stevenson Oies, 1971, National Gallery ofArt Archives

The Sixty-fifth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery’ ofArt

2,604th Concert

Mark Kaplan, violinist, and Yael Weiss, pianist

Presented in honor of

jasper Johns: An Allegory ofPainting, 2 9 55 — 2 9 65

First concert ofthe Sixty-second American Music Festival

February 18, 2007

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

East Building Auditorium

Admissionfree
Program

Performed without intermission

Roger Sessions (1896-1985)

Duofor Violin and Piano (1942)

Joel Feigin (b. 1951)

Veranderungen (1995)

Elliott Carter (b. 1908)

Duofor Violin and Piano (1974)

The Exhibition and the Festival

Jasper Johns: An Allegory ofPainting, 2955-1965, on view at the National

Gallery through April 29, includes some ofJohns’ (b. 1930) most important

paintings, drawings, and prints, among them Target with Plaster Casts (1955)

and Diver (1962). Johns’ early work was devoted to examining and reinventing the premises of painting during an era when painting practice was

riddled with conceptual upheaval and doubt. Much ofthe music chosen for

the Sixty-second American Music Festival was also the result of conceptual 

upheaval, as composers in the same period reexamined their own practices.

From 1955 to 1965, contacts between painters and composers were

particularly fruitful in New York City. When the works of unorthodox

composers such as John Cage, Morton Feldman, Ralph Shapey, and Stefan

Wolpe were performed, artists faithfully attended. The era also saw the birth

of performance art, in which dance, drama, music, painting, poetry, and 

sculpture might be brought together in one event. In his Lecture on Something (1959), John Cage said, “When starting to be abstract, artists referred to

musical practices to show that what they were doing was valid; so nowadays,

musicians, to explain what they are doing, say, ‘See, the painters and sculptors have been doing it for quite some time.’” Johns enjoyed a long and close

association with the world of ballet in particular, and in 1973 he designed

the set and costumes for Un Jour ou Deux, working with Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham.

By 1955, the National Gallery’s American Music Festival, an annual festival ofmusic by American composers, was in its eleventh year. In the decade

that followed, avant-garde composers such as Elliott Carter, David Diamond, 

Leon Kirchner, Walter Piston, Ralph Shapey, Virgil Thomson, and Stefan

Wolpe were among the dozens of composers whose works were performed

at the Gallery’s festivals.

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The Musicians

MARK KAPLAN

One ofthe leading violinists of his generation, Mark Kaplan has appeared

with nearly every major American orchestra, including the Los Angeles

Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, and the symphony orchestras of

Chicago, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. He has collaborated with many ofthe

world’s foremost conductors, among them Lawrence Foster, Lorin Maazel, 

Kurt Masur, Eugene Ormandy, Simon Rattle, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Leonard

Slatkin, and Klaus Tennstedt. Kaplan is also devoted to chamber music, and

he performs and records internationally with Yael Weiss and cellist Clancy 

Newman as the Sequenza Trio.

Kaplan’s wide-ranging repertoire is well represented by his more than

two dozen recordings. These include concerti by Berg and Stravinsky, the

Lalo Symphonic Espagnole, and Joan Manen’s Concierto Espagnol, all recently

released on the Koch International Classics label.

Kaplan has been a professor of violin at Indiana University’s Jacobs

School of Music since 2005. Prior to that he served as professor with distinction at the University ofCalifornia, Los Angeles. He is a graduate ofThe

Juilliard School, where he studied with Dorothy DeLay. Kaplan plays a violin 

made by Antonio Stradivari in 1685, known as the Marquis. He appears at

the National Gallery by arrangement with Jonathan Wentworth Associates,

Ltd., of Mount Vernon, New York.

YAEL WEISS

The Washington Post described Yael Weiss as “a pianist who delves deeply

and tellingly into that cloudy area where fantasy morphs into improvisation,

inventiveness being common to both.” Weiss has performed across Europe,

Japan, South America, and the United States at such venues as New York’s

Alice Tully Hall, Washington's Kennedy Center, and London’s Wigmore

LIall. A frequent soloist with major orchestras, she has appeared with the

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Augusta Symphony Orchestra, the Brazil National Symphony, the Chautauqua

Festival Orchestra, the Israel Chamber Orchestra, the Jacksonville Symphony

Orchestra, the Jerusalem Symphony, the Prague Chamber Orchestra, and the

Seattle Symphony Orchestra, among others. Weiss is also a regular favorite

at international music festivals, including those of Banff, Caramoor, the City

of London, Marlboro, and Ravinia.

This season she released two new solo CDs on the Koch International

Classics label, one devoted to piano music of Robert Schumann and the

other to works united by the theme ofjoy, from more than a dozen composers spanning three centuries.

Weiss currently serves on the faculty of Indiana University’s Jacobs

School of Music. She studied with Richard Goode and Edward Aldwell at the

Mannes College of Music and with Leon Eleisher at the Peabody Institute.

Further information on the artist can be found at her Web site, www.yaehveiss

.com. Weiss appears at the National Gallery by arrangement with Diane Saldick, llc, of New York City.

Program Notes

Born in Brooklyn in 1896, Roger Sessions showed remarkable intellectual and

musical precocity, entering Harvard University at the age offourteen. From

1925 to 1933, he lived and worked in Paris, Berlin, and Florence, during which

time his style evolved from the open intervals ofhis Symphony no. 1 of 1927 to

the more chromatic sound of his Violin Concerto of 1935. In later works, such

as Symphony no. 3 (1957). he used the twelve-tone technique. In addition to

a 1974 Pulitzer citation for his life’s work, Sessions was awarded the Pulitzer

Prize for his Concertofor Orchestra in 1982. He counted among his pupils

such eminent composers as Milton Babbitt, David Diamond, Leon Kirchner, 

George Tsontakis, Hugo Weisgall, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. Known for wry

comments about his own music, Sessions once said ofthe Duofor Violin and

Piano (1942), “I called it a duo because I was tired of calling things sonatas,

although [the Duo] is a sonata.”

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Joel Feigin’s works have been widely praised for their “very strong

impact, as logical in musical design as they are charged with emotion and

drama” (Opera Magazine). His many honors include a Senior Fulbright

Fellowship to study at the Moscow State Conservatory and a Guggenheim

Fellowship to write his first opera, Mysteries ofEleusis, produced in 1986 at

Cornell University. He studied composition with Nadia Boulanger at Fontainebleau and with Roger Sessions at The Juilliard School. In 1998 Feigin’s

Veranderungen for violin and piano was recognized as the best composition 

ofits type for that year by two prestigious new music organizations, Speculum Musicae and the Auros Group for New Music.

At age ninety-nine, Elliott Carter is the nation’s oldest living composer 

of note. A member ofthe American Academy ofArts and Letters, Carter has

received many honors, among them Grammy awards, the National Medal

of Arts, the Pulitzer Prize for Music, and the Royal Philharmonic Society

Gold Medal. In the published score for his Duofor Violin and Piano, he

included the following note: “The Duofor Violin and Piano, composed in

1974 and dedicated to my wife, Flelen, was commissioned by the McKim

Fund in the Library of Congress. The composition draws its basic character 

primarily from the contrast between the sounds made by stroking the violin

with a bow (that can be sensitively controlled during their duration) and 

the sounds made by striking the piano that, once produced, die away and

can only be controlled by being cut short.... This contrast between the two

instruments is maintained throughout, while many different moods are

expressed, some in quick succession, others in a more leisurely way.”

Program notes by Sorab Modi

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Next Week at the National Gallery ofArt

Alan Feinberg, pianist

Music by Babbitt, Cage, Feldman, Helps, Ives, and Nancarrow 

Presented in honor of

Jasper Johns: An Allegoiy ofPainting, 1955-1965,

as part ofthe Sixty-second American Music Festival

February 25, 2007

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

East Building Auditorium