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.

Please note that late entry or reentry ofthe

West Building after 6:30 pm is not permitted.

For the convenience of concertgoers, 

the Garden Cafe remains open for light refreshments

until 6:00 pm on Sundays.

Music Department

National Gallery of Art

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue nw

Washington, DC

www.n2a.s0v

COVER: Canaletto, Ascension Day Festival at Venice, 1766,

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Samuel H. Kress Collection

The Sixty-ninth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery ofArt

2,837th Concert

Venice Baroque Orchestra

with

Giuliano Carmignola, violinist

Presented in honor of Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals

April 10, 2011

Sunday, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Admissionfree
Program

Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)

Sinfonia in A Majorfor Strings and Continuo

Allegro molto

Andante molto

Allegro

Baldassare Galuppi (1706-1785)

Concerto a Quattro in G Minorfor Strings and Continuo

Grave

Spiritoso

Allegro

Tomaso Albinoni (1671-1751)

Concerto a Cinque in G Majorfor Strings and Continuo, op. vn, no. 4

Allegro 

Adagio

Allegro

Giuseppe Tartini (1692-1770)

Concerto in A Majorfor Violin, Strings, and Continuo, D. 96

Allegro 

Adagio 

Presto

Largo andante: “Arivi, a fonti, a fiumi correte amare

lagrime sin tanto che consumi Lacerbo mio dolor”

INTERMISSION

Vivaldi

Conceito in E-fat Majorfor Violin, Strings, and Continuo, rv. 253

(“La tempesta di Mare”)

Presto

Largo

Presto

Conceito in G Minorfor Violin, Strings, and Continuo, rv. 332

Allegro 

Largo

Allegro

Concerto in D Majorfor Violin, Strings, and Continuo, rv. 210

Allegro 

Largo

Allegro
The Musicians

VENICE BAROQUE ORCHESTRA

Founded in 1997 by baroque scholar and harpsichordist Andrea Marcon, the

Venice Baroque Orchestra is recognized as one of Europe’s premier ensembles devoted to period instrument performance. Recent concert and opera

performances include Vivaldi’s Andromeda liberata at the Ambronay Festival;

Vivaldi’s Juditha triumphans in Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Baden-Baden’s

Festspielhaus, and the Theatre des Champs-Elysees; and Ludovico Ariosto’s

Orlandofurioso in Rome. Tire ensemble has toured with outstanding specialists in early music including countertenor Andreas Scholl, mezzo-sopranos

Romina Basso and Magdalena Kozena, soprano Anna Netrebko, and violinists Viktoria Mullova and Giuliano Carmignola. Additional concert tours

have taken the orchestra to China, France, Germany, Japan, and Korea.

Committed to the rediscovery offirst-rate baroque opera, Marcon has

led the Venice Baroque Orchestra in modern-day premieres of Francesco

Cavalli’s L’Orione, Vivaldi’s Atenaide e Benedetto, and Benedetto Marcello’s

La Morte DAdone and II trionfo della poesia e della musica. With Teatro La

Fenice in Venice, the orchestra staged Handel’s Siroe in 2000, followed by

an equally successful staging of Cimarosa’s LOlimpiade in 2001. In April

2004, the orchestra revived Siroe in its first full staging in the United States 

at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Frequently engaged to make landmark recordings of baroque works,

the orchestra has recently completed the first-ever recording of Andromeda

liberata for Deutsche Grammophon. Its extensive discography also includes

two recordings ofviolin concertos with Giuliano Carmignola, an album

ofVivaldi sinfonias and concertos for strings, and Vivaldi motets and arias

with soprano Simone Kermes. For its recordings, the ensemble has been

honored with the Diapason d’Or, the Choc du Monde de la Musique, the

Echo Award, and the Edison Award. Filmed in concert by the bbc and

Japan’s nhk, the orchestra’s concerts have been broadcast by Arte, BBC3,

France Musiques, National Public Radio, RaiDue, Radio France, and

4

RadioTre. The Venice Baroque Orchestra is supported by the Fondazione

Cassamarca in Treviso, Italy, and appears at the National Gallery by arrangement with Alliance Artist Management, wwuKallianceart-istmanagement.com.

GIULIANO CARMIGNOLA

Equally accomplished on modern and baroque violins, Giuliano Carmignola

is highly regarded for his command of a broad repertoire, ranging from

baroque to twentieth-century works. An award-winner at the Premio Citta 

di Vittorio Veneto Competition in 1971 and the Paganini Competition in

Genoa two years later, Carmignola quickly secured his status as a leading

soloist, playing under Claudio Abbado, Eliahu Inbal, Peter Maag, and

Giuseppe Sinopoli in prestigious venues that included the Berlin Philharmonic, London’s Royal Albert Hall, Milan’s La Scala, Moscow’s Tchaikovsky

Hall, and Vienna’s Musikverein. Carmignola’s concerto appearances this

season include performances with the Academy ofAncient Music in the

United Kingdom; Paul McCreesh and the Basel Chamber Orchestra in 

France and Germany; Claudio Abbado and the Orchestra Mozart in Italy;

the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam; and the Venice Baroque

Orchestra in Switzerland, France, Italy, and the United States.

In demand as a conductor and chamber musician, Carmignola has

led the Basel Chamber Orchestra, the Kammerakademie Potsdam, the

Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and the Orchestre des Champs-Elysees, and

has collaborated in recital with fortepianists Robert Levin and Yasuyo Yano

and violinist Viktoria Mullova. In addition to his award-winning recordings

with the Venice Baroque Orchestra, Carmignola has also recorded the

complete Mozart concertos with Claudio Abbado and Orchestra Mozart.

A native ofTreviso, Italy, Carmignola began his studies with his father, 

Antonio, and graduated from the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello in 

Venice, where he studied with Luigi Ferro. He attended master classes with

Franco Gulli, Nathan Milstein, and Henryk Szeryng. A professor of violin 

at the Lucerne Hochschule fur Musik and Siena’s Accademia Musicale

Chigiana, Giuliano Carmignola plays a 1732 Stradivarius violin on permanent loan from the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna.

5
Program Notes

By the eighteenth century, Venetians could claim a heritage ofmore than

two hundred years of glorious music and illustrious composers. Looking

back to the sixteenth century, they could point to Adrian Willaert (1490-

1562) and his pupils Andrea (1532-1585) and Giovanni (1554-1612) Gabrieli,

all ofwhom served as music director at the Cathedral of Saint Mark.

From the seventeenth century, they could boast ofClaudio Monteverdi

(1567-1643), Francesco Cavalli (1602-1676), and Giovanni Legrenzi

(1626-1690). During the course ofthe eighteenth century, the era of

Antonio Vivaldi, Tomaso Albinoni, and the superstar castrato Carlo Broschi,

popularly known as Farinelli (1705-1782), the city’s vibrant cultural life

also inspired a school of cityscape painters whose achievements are among

the most brilliant ofthe period. The exhibition Venice: Canaletto and His

Rivals celebrates the rich variety ofthese painted views of Venice, known

as vedute, through masterworks by Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697-1768), 

popularly known as Canaletto, and his rivals, including Bernardo Bellotto

(1720-1780), Francesco Guardi (1712-1793), and Michele Marieschi

(1710-1743). Responding to an art market fueled largely by the Grand Tour,

these gifted painters depicted the famous monuments and vistas ofVenice

in different moods and seasons. This evening’s program brings together

works by some ofthe city’s most illustrious resident composers, providing 

an opportunity to hear music that was played within the walls ofthe palaces

and churches depicted in the vedute.

Antonio Vivaldi was recognized throughout Europe for his innovative

contributions to string writing, the concerto genre, and programmatic

orchestral music. Fie and his contemporaries used the term sinfonia interchangeably with sonata and canzona to indicate a piece that was intended for

an ensemble—preserving the derivation from the Greek word symphonia

(sounding together). An unabashed musical borrower and improviser, 

Vivaldi often reused his own material and modified it for new purposes.

6

His work was constantly evolving and changing, and each performance was

most likely unique, responding to the nature ofthe room, the reactions of

the audience, and the whims and passions ofthe performers. The exciting

challenge for contemporary performers is to recapture the spirit of Vivaldi

and his exuberant age.

Born on the island of Burano, where a monument has been erected

in his memory, Baldassare Galuppi was known to his eighteenth-century

Venetian colleagues as “II Buranello.” A pupil ofAntonio Lotti, Galuppi

worked most of his life in Venice except for sojourns at the court of

Catherine the Great in Saint Petersburg and as an opera composer in

London. Written while he was the choirmaster at the Ospedale degli Incurabili (Venice’s hospice for “incurables”) and at Saint Mark’s Cathedral, his 

sacred choral works include oratorios, motets, masses, and other settings 

ofliturgical texts. His instrumental works consist ofseveral dozen keyboard sonatas (which were influential in the development ofthe form)

and a set of concerti grossi, which was for a long time misattributed to the 

more famous Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713). Galuppi’s music went out of

fashion soon after his death and is only now being rediscovered.

Famous in his own lifetime as a composer of operas and music for

the violin, Tomaso Albinoni is known to modern audiences primarily on

account of a work that he may not have composed. According to the Italian

musicologist Remo Giazotto (1910-1998), the immensely popular and 

frequently recorded Adagio in G Minor for violin, strings, and organ is

based on a manuscript fragment (consisting of a few measures ofthe 

melody line and basso continuo) from a slow movement of a trio sonata.

Tire fragment was one of a few documents in the Dresden State Library

that survived the bombing ofthe city in 1944. Giazotto concluded that the 

fragment was a portion of a sonata da chiesa (church sonata) composed by

Albinoni, possibly as part of his opus 4, around 1708. He constructed the 

balance ofthe complete single-movement work around the fragmentary
theme he ascribed to Albinoni, copyrighted it, and published it in 1958. A

lush adaptation ofthe Adagio for large string orchestra was featured in the 

1981 award-winning film Gallipoli. Ten years later, the Adagio was adapted for

rock guitars and recorded by The Doors, using lead singer Jim Morrison’s

prerecorded poetry, as “The Severed Garden.”

A considerable number ofAlbinonis works have survived intact, among

them four sets of concerti a cinque (concertos in five voices), opp. 5, 7, 9,

and 10. Reflecting the attention that Albinoni and other eighteenth-century

composers paid to numerology, each set contains twelve concertos—the

number twelve being a symbol for perfection and completeness. Johann 

Sebastian Bach owned several scores ofAlbinoni concertos, apparently 

copied by Bach himself, an indication that he held his Italian contemporary

in high esteem.

Born in Piran, a town in present-day Slovenia that in the eighteenth

century was a part ofthe Republic ofVenice, Giuseppe Tartini received his 

basic musical training, including violin instruction, as a novice in a Franciscan monastery. He left the novitiate to study law at the University of Padua,

where he developed a reputation as a skilled swordsman. In 1710, at age

eighteen, he married Elisabetta Premazone, who was not only several years

younger than the composer, but also a favorite ofthe powerful Cardinal

Giorgio Comaro (1658-1722), who promptly charged Tartini with abduction 

and ordered his arrest. To escape prosecution, Tartini fled to the monastery

of Saint Francis in Assisi, where he resumed playing the violin. By 1721 his

skill had improved so remarkably that he was offered the post of Maestro

di Cappella at the Basilica di Sant’ Antonio in Padua. Since Cardinal Comaro

was by then too old and feeble to press charges, and the Basilica offered

Tartini a contract that allowed him to concertize wherever and whenever he 

wished, he decided to risk returning to Padua, the scene of his “crime.” The

first known owner of a violin made by Antonio Stradivarius, Tartini started a

violin school that attracted students from all over Europe. He also published

important treatises on the theory ofharmony and acoustics. The passion

that marked Tartini’s life and music is reflected in the subtitle that he 

provided for the final movement of his Violin Concerto in A Major—“A rivi,

a fonti, a fiumi correte amare lagrime sin tanto che consumi l’acerbo mio 

dolor” (O bitter tears, flow as rivulets, as springs, as rivers, so that my bitter

sorrow is consumed).

Program, notes by Stephen Ackert, head, music department,

National Gallery ofArt

9
Next week at the National Gallery of Art

Georgia Chamber Singers and Men in Blaque

Music by Martin, Stravinsky, and other composers

April 17, 2011

Sunday, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

10