haunting rhythms of the habanera. It should surprise no one to learn that

Manuel de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain is directly descended

from it. Falla relates that he never forgot his first meeting with Debussy in

1907 and learned much from a study of his Spanish music.

All three pieces from Schumann’s Phantasiestucke were inspired

by aspects of the night. They come from the pen of the youthful, lifeembracing Schumann, for whom the night was still a mystery. Later it

would become a terror, as the dark side of his personality gained the upper 

hand. Fie would eventually be “tormented by demons,” in his own words,

as he sank into mental collapse after a failed attempt at suicide.

After such somber thoughts, it is a relief to turn to two pieces that

offer a more festive view of the night. Felix Mendelssohn was only sixteen

years old when he composed the incidental music to Shakespeare’s A

Midsummer Night’s Dream. Rachmaninoff’s celebrated piano transcription of the Scherzo has long since entered the pantheon of great music. Its

finger-twisting difficulties have brought about the downfall of many a

virtuoso, and Rachmaninoff’s own recorded performance is a constant 

reminder of what faces the pianist who would play this work. Few are the

heroes of the keyboard who can confront the technical hurdles of this piece

with equanimity.

Alfred Grtinfeld’s Soiree de Vienne, as its title implies, is an

evocation of imperial Vienna, with its marble ballrooms, chandeliers, and

dancers swirling to the music of Johann Strauss. Griinfeld was a

Hungarian pianist and composer of operettas and sophisticated salon

music. He appears to have been the first pianist of note to have made

recordings (during the period between 1899 and 1914), and his reputation

was secured by his tours in Europe and the United States. He was

renowned for his exquisite tonal control, which suggested comparisons 

with the great Ukrainian virtuoso pianist, Vladimir de Pachman (1848—

1933). Josef Hofmann, one of the great American pianists of the first third

of the twentieth century, remarked that Griinfeld “had a velvety touch, but

he only played salon music really well.” His brilliant concert paraphrases 

are all but forgotten today, but they may be compared to those of Liszt and

Godowsky in their technical polish and dazzling insouciance.

The Sixty-first Season of

THE WILLIAM NELSON CROMWELL and

F. LAMMOT BELIN CONCERTS

National Gallery of Art

2455th Concert

VALERIE TRYON, pianist

Presented in honor of the exhibition

Frederic Remington: The Color ofNight

Sunday Evening, 13 April 2003

Seven O’clock

West Building, West Garden Court

Admission free
Program

Frederic Chopin

(1810-1849)

Two Nocturnes

Op. 9 (1830)

No. 1 in B-flat Minor

No. 2 in E-flat Major

Franz Fiszt 

(1811-1886)

Harmonies du soir

No. 11 from “Etudes d’execution transcendante”

(1851)

Enrique Granados

(1867-1916)

The Dover and the Nightingale

from “Goyescas” (1911)

Claude Debussy

(1862-1918)

Fa terrasse des audiences du clair de lune

from “Preludes,” Book II (c. 1910)

La soiree dans Grenade

from “Estampes” (1903)

Intermission

Robert Schumann

(1810-1856)

Three Phantasiestticke

Op. 12 (1837)

No. 1: Des Abends (In the Evening)

No. 5: In der Nacht (At Night)

No. 7: Traumes Wirren (Troubled Dreams)

Francis Poulenc

(1899-1963)

Three Nocturnes

(1929-1934)

No. 1 in C Major

No. 2 in A Major (Bal des jeunes filles)

No. 3 in F Major (Bal fantome)

Felix Mendelssohn

(1809-1847)

Scherzo from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

Arranged for piano solo by Sergey Rachmaninoff

Alfred Griinfeld Soiree de Vienne

The use ofcameras or recording equipment during

the performance is not allowed. Please he sure that cell

phones, pagers, and other electronic devices are turned off.

For the convenience of concert goers

the Garden Cafe remains open until 6:30 p.m.

The Musician

Valerie Tryon’s career as a concert pianist began while she was still a

child. By the age of twelve, she had broadcast for the BBC and was

appearing regularly before the public on the concert platform. She was

one of the youngest students ever admitted to the Royal Academy of

Music in Fondon, where she received the highest award in piano playing

and a stipend that made it possible for her to study in Paris with Jacques

Fevrier. Her place among Britain’s acknowledged artists was assured

when a Cheltenham Festival recital brought her the enthusiastic acclaim

of the country’s foremost critics. Her extensive repertoire ranges from

Bach to contemporary composers and includes more than sixty concertos

and a vast range of chamber music. She is well known for her sensitive

interpretations of the romantics, in particular Chopin, Fiszt, and

Rachmaninoff. She has played in Toronto, Boston, Washington, 

Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, and Fos Angeles as well as in most of the major

concert halls in Britain. Among British composers, both Alun Hoddinott

and John McCabe have dedicated works to her. Valerie Tryon is the

artist-in-residence of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
Program Notes

Across the ages the night has inspired painters, poets, playwrights, and,

above all, musicians to produce some of their best work. The repertory of

night music is far larger than one might suppose. Bartok, Ravel,

Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, Liszt, Scriabin, and Schumann have

composed music connected with the night, some of it dreamlike, some

expressing terror. There is music about the void, moonlight, twilight, the

stars, and sleep, about dreams and nightmares, ghosts, goblins, and

nightingales. Both painters and composers have used the title Nocturne for

works inspired by the night. Some of them have focused exclusively on its

peaceful and restful aspects. Others, like Chopin and Frederic Remington,

confronted such aspects as danger, death, and psychological disturbance.

In their overall effect, these works allow the viewer or listener a controlled 

environment in which to experience nocturnal emotions, both positive and

negative, and rid the darkness of some of its uncertainties.

The first composer to make use of the term nocturne and establish

it as a genre was John Field (1782-1837), who bestowed this novel title on

eighteen of his piano pieces. His method was to unfold a cantabile melody

in the right hand, while drawing harmonies from across two or more

octaves of the lower half of the keyboard, releasing all the upper partials

through the sustaining pedal and bathing the instrument in a warm glow.

His approach to piano texture captured the attention of Chopin, whose

nocturnes placed the genre on a higher footing. The melodies in Chopin’s

nocturnes are subjected to constant variation, and with each return they are

called upon to bear the weight of ever more complex ornamentation. Some

of these pieces are miniature masterworks that will continue to grace the

concert hall as long as the piano recital itself survives. The two Chopin

nocturnes in tonight’s program date from 1830 and are among the first he

composed. Chopin’s nocturnes in turn inspired other composers as diverse

as Scriabin, Faure, and Poulenc.

Liszt’s Transcendental Study No. 11 in D-flat Major, is subtitled

Harmonies du soir (Evening Harmonies). Liszt purportedly liked to

compose and play the piano with an image in his mind’s eye. In his

memoir, Liszt’s pupil Arthur Friedheim tells of an occasion when he had a

lesson at Liszt’s villa in Tivoli. Friedheim played Harmonies du soir but

could not grasp the mood, and Liszt beckoned the young man to the

window. It was early evening at sunset and golden rays were already

casting velvet shadows across the Italian campagna. “There are your

evening harmonies,” Friedheim recalls Liszt declaring. “Play that.”

With his Goyescas, two volumes of pieces named after scenes by

Goya, the Spanish composer Enrique Granados brought modern Spanish

music into the world. The most famous of these pieces is entitled El amor

y la muerte (Love and Death). It is universally known in English-speaking 

countries by the mistranslated title, The Lover and the Nightingale.

Granados’ untimely death at age forty-nine was a great loss to Spanish

music. He was returning to Spain in 1916 after having attending the New

York premiere of his opera, Goyescas, and having played at a White

House reception given by President Woodrow Wilson. The ship on which

Granados and his wife were passengers was torpedoed by a German

submarine, and the couple drowned.

Even during his lifetime Claude Debussy was widely 

acknowledged as the inventor of a new kind of pianism. From both the

fingers and the feet of his interpreters he demands many nuances hitherto

unexploited. His use of color and imagery in sound are unrivaled, and he

expects of the pianist an absolute mastery over the most subtle shades of

sound. Pianists and musicologists talk of atmosphere in the music of

Debussy and it is to him that we owe this ephemeral concept. La terrasse

des audiences du clair de lune, from the second book of Debussy

Preludes, is among the best examples of atmospheric music. Within its

widely spaced textures are distance, space, and light, evocative of a new

aesthetic in which tonality itself seems to be on the verge of liquidation.

La soiree dans Grenade is one of several Debussy pieces that are

conspicuously successful in evoking Spain and its music, even though the

composer never set foot on the Iberian Peninsula. Running through this

composition are ostinato effects, the sound of distant guitars, and the