For the convenience of concertgoers

the Garden Cafe remains open until 6:oo pm.

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 of

the West Building after 6:30 pm is not permitted.

Music Department

National Gallery of Art

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue nw

Washington, DC

Mailing address

2000b South Club Drive

Landover, md 20785

www.nga.gov

The Sixty-eighth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery of Art

2,782nd Concert

Del Sol String Quartet

Kate Stenberg, violin

Rick Shinozaki, violin

Charlton Lee, viola

Hannah Addario-Berry, cello

Presented in collaboration with the 

office of Cultural Programs ofthe

National Academy of Sciences in honor of

The Robert and Jane MeyerhojfCollection: Selected Works

April 11, 2010

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Admissionfree
This concert is sponsored in part by Cultural Programs ofthe National

Academy of Sciences and the Randy Hostetler Living Room Music Fund.

The mission ofthe office ofCultural Programs ofthe National Academy

of Sciences (cpnas) is to explore the intersections of art, science, and

culture through the presentation of public exhibitions, lectures, and

other cultural programs. The National Academy of Sciences (nas) is

a private, nonprofit, self-perpetuating society to which distinguished

scholars are elected for their achievements in research, and is dedicated 

to the furtherance ofscience and technology and to their use for the 

general welfare. Upon the authority ofthe charter granted to it by the

Congress in 1863, the nas has a mandate to advise the federal government on scientific and technical matters.

Program

Pawel Szymariski (b. 1954)

Five Piecesfor String Quartet (1993)

Chinary Ung (b. 1942)

Spiral x: “In Memoriam” for amplified string quartet (2007)

INTERMISSION

Tania Leon (b. 1943)

“Esencia” para cuarteto de cuerdas (2009)

Agua de florida

Agua de rosas

Agua de manantial

Philip Glass (b. 1937)

Quartet No. 5 (1991)
The Musicians

Two-time winner ofthe Chamber Music America/ASCAP First Prize for

Adventurous Programming, the San Francisco-based Del Sol String Quartet

explores new ways ofinteracting with audiences, composers, and other

musicians. The members ofthe Quartet are violinists Kate Stenberg and

Rick Shinozaki, violist Charlton Lee, and cellist Flannah Addario-Berry. The

group has commissioned and introduced new works by composers from

around the globe. It has performed frequently at the Other Minds Festival in

San Francisco, playing works by Pawel Mykietyn, Dobromila Jaskot, Elena

Kats-Chernin, Michael Nyman, and Per Norgard, among others. The Quartet

often collaborates with innovative non-traditional performers such as the 

hip-hop inspired Haitian-American composer and violinist Daniel Bernard 

Roumain and the Chinese music ensemble Melody of China. In 2009 Del

Sol premiered works commissioned from renowned Cuban-American 

composer Tania Leon and emerging Korean-American composer Paul Yeon

Lee. Upcoming commissions include Joan Jeanrenaud’s first string quartet

and new works by Ronald Bruce Smith and Gabriela Lena Frank.

The Del Sol String Quartet has released four critically acclaimed cds

since 2002: First Life, a world premiere recording ofthe complete string

quartets ofAmerican composer Marc Blitzstein; George Antheil: The Complete

Worksfor String Quartet; Ring ofFire: Music ofthe Pacific Rim, focusing 

uniquely on music by composers from that part ofthe world; and Tear,

featuring works by young composers from the Americas. Gramophone magazine described Del Sol as “masters of all musical things... playing with a

combination offerocious attack, riveting interplay, and silken splendor.’’

The ensemble’s current season includes the 2010 Pacific Rim Festival at the 

University ofCalifornia at Santa Cruz and at Brandeis University in Waltham,

Massachusetts; Candlelight Concerts in Columbia, Maryland; and the University of Vermont’s Bishop Lane Artists’ Series. More information about the

Quartet is available at www.delsolquartet.com.

4

Program Notes

Through remarkable acuity, exhaustive study, and close relationships with 

artists, Robert and Jane Meyerhoff amassed a unique collection with an 

emphasis on six American masters: Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy

Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella, in addition to important works by leading abstract expressionists and younger artists.

The Robert and Jane MeyerhoffCollection: Selected Works remains on view in

the East Building until May 2, 2010. Like the artists represented in the exhibition, the composers whose works were selected for this concert share an 

aesthetic search that begins and ends with a sense ofstriking immediacy.

Polish-bom Pawel Szymanski graduated from the Warsaw State Higher

School of Music (now the Fryderyk Chopin Music Academy), where he 

studied composition with Wlodzimierz Kotonski and Tadeusz Baird. In 1984

he received a Herder scholarship to study for a year with Roman HaubenstockRamati in Vienna. He has subsequently garnered numerous prizes and

awards including first prize in the Young Composers’ Competition ofThe 

Polish Composers’ Association (1979); an award at the Sacred Music Composition Contest ofthe International Bach Academy in Stuttgart, Germany 

(1984); a prize in the 1987 Louisville Orchestra Competition that included

honorary citizenship ofthe city of Louisville, Kentucky; first prize in the 

Benjamin Britten Composing Competition in Aldeburgh, England (1988);

and the main prize at the Competition ofThe International Foundation of

Polish Music (1995). In 2005 Szymanski was decorated with the Gloria Artis

award, the Republic of Poland’s highest honor for contributions to Polish

Culture. In 2006 the Association of Polish Audiovisual Publishers presented

a festival of Pawel Szymanski’s music and released a four-DVD video archive

ofthe event.

Szymanski’s Five Piecesfor String Quartet was composed in 1993 in

response to a bbc commission for the Brodsky Quartet. The work is dedicated to the memory ofhis friend Jerzy Stajuda (1936-1992), one of Poland’s

outstanding artists. Each ofthe five pieces has a strongly individual texture,

based on a single idea. The first is based on a briefphrase which could be

5
from Mozart or Haydn, but is worked through a dizzying series ofslides

from all four instruments. The second has a skipping, mechanical texture

built up from single short notes. The third piece is the still, calm center of

the work, consisting of glassy chords in harmonics, with faint ghosts of

melody, while the fourth features loud, throbbing arpeggiated chords played

by all four instruments. The final piece begins with the first violin playing

bleak, squawking chords. The other instruments quietly creep in, but remain

in the background. The first violin never manages to pull the others into

playing in coordinated rhythm; instead they simply melt away into silence.

Chinary Ung was born in Takeo, Cambodia. For a young boy living in a

small village, toys were scarce, and Ung recalled in an interview with the 

Los Angeles Times that “we would roll up banana leaves and blow in them to

make a trumpet-like sound, or we would fill jars with rain water to hear the 

different tones they would make.” His family played traditional Cambodian 

instruments at home, and it was not until he was a teenager that Ung finally

heard western music for the first time. In 1964, after studying the clarinet at

the University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, he immigrated to the United 

States. He studied at Columbia University with Chou Wen-Chung, receiving

his doctorate in 1974. In 1977, sensing the imminent disappearance of an

entire musical tradition at the hands ofthe Cambodian dictatorship, Ung

produced two lps ofCambodian traditional music on the Folkways label.

His own compositions came to international attention in 1989 when he 

received the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for his orchestral piece Inner

Voices. He holds the position of professor ofmusic at the University of

California, San Diego.

Genocide is not an easy theme to acknowledge in music, but for Ung,

whose studies in Buddhism have led him to express compassion for human

suffering, it had become a necessity. In 2007, when he was awarded a

Koussevitsky Commission to write a work for the Del Sol String Quartet, 

Ung decided to compose a tenth work in his “Spiral” series that would

6

commemorate the Cambodian holocaust perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge

between 1975 and 1979. Among the 1.7 million people killed in Cambodia

during those years were half of Ung’s family members and many of his

close personal friends.

The cries and shouts emanating from the four members ofthe string

quartet as Spiral x (Spiral Ten) is performed present a tremendous challenge.

The players intone nonsensical phonemes and sing in raw village style, very

explicidy scored. In addition, various members are asked to sing and whisde, 

often while playing completely different material. Much ofthe work appears 

to be a dialogue between very different individual personalities until the 

conclusion, with its shamanistic unison shouting directed at dispelling the 

suffering ofthe victims, living and dead. Spiral x was premiered by the Del

Sol Quartet to a standing ovation on October 19, 2007, in the Coolidge

Auditorium ofthe Library ofCongress, with the composer in attendance.

Cuban-born Tania Leon is recognized for her accomplishments as a

composer, conductor, educator, and as advisor to arts organizations. She has 

been profiled on abc, cbs, cnn, pbs, Univision, and Telemundo as well as

in independent films. Her works have been performed by the China National

Symphony, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the National Symphony

Orchestra ofJohannesburg, and the Norddeutche Rundfunk Orchestra of

Hamburg. She has collaborated with poets and directors, including John

Ashbery, Rita Dove, Mark Lamos, and Derek Walcott. Leon has appeared as

guest conductor with the Symphony Orchestra and Chorus of Marseille,

the Orquesta de la Comunidad y Coro de Madrid, the Orquesta Sinfonica de

Asturias, L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, and the Santa Cecilia Orchestra. 

A professor at Brooklyn College since 1985, Tania Leon was named distinguished professor ofthe City University of New York in 2006.

7
“Esencia” para cuarteto de cuerdas was commissioned for the Del Sol String

Quartet through a grant from the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard 

University. Through her first string quartet, Leon recollects her surroundings

and childhood in Cuba. In her explanation ofthe piece, she makes reference

to the more abstract meaning of esencia (“the essence or initial point that

determines behavior and style”), but she also explains that the title given to

each movement ofthe work represents the name of a fragrance that surrounded her while growing up in Cuba:

“Agua de Jlorida is a cologne that was very popular among my neighbors.

They used this cologne to clean and create a good spiritual vibration in their 

homes. Agua de rosas is another aroma that I recognized from that time, a

favorite ofmy grandmother. Her name was Rosa. Agua de manantial is an 

aroma attributed to flowing fresh water in the countryside by the forests, 

near the farmers’ homes. People claimed that the waters of a manantial had

healing attributes.”

Philip Glass grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, and studied music at the 

University ofChicago, the Juilliard School, and the Aspen Music Festival,

where he worked with Darius Milhaud. Unsatisfied with what he was

learning at home, he went to Europe to study with Nadia Boulanger, the 

legendary teacher ofsuch famous composers as Aaron Copland and Virgil

Thomson. He also worked closely with sitar player Ravi Shankar. In 1967

Glass returned to New York City and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble, 

consisting ofseven musicians who played keyboards and woodwinds and

used electronic amplification and mixing to enhance and change the sound

oftheir instruments. He was soon dubbed a “minimalist” composer, but he 

did not care for this label, preferring to speak of himself as a composer of

“music with repetitive structures.” Through his large output ofwork and

wide-ranging collaboration with artists in other fields, including Woody

Allen, David Bowie, Allen Ginsberg, and Twyla Tharp, Philip Glass has

had an extraordinary impact on the musical and intellectual life the late

twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The tone ofthe Glass’ Fifth Quartet is luminous from the opening bars,

where a pluck and a shimmering leap up through the instruments transforms the trademark Glass arpeggio into a sweet bell-like announcement.

Similarly transformed are all of the familiar conventions ofthe composer’s

style, including his elusive repetitiveness where subtle shifts continually 

occur. A study in contrasts, the quartet moves from fast-moving rhythmic

sections to slow, chordal ones as dynamics constandy shift back and forth 

between loud and soft.

Program notes compiled by Charlton Lee, using materials provided by Charles

Amirkhanian, bbc-j, and Mark Swed (excerptedfrom www.philipglass.comj.

Used by permission

9
Next Week at the National Gallery ofArt

Virginia Virtuosi

Music by Gershwin, Gottschalk,

Milhaud, Piston, and Ravel

Presented in honor of

From Impressionism to Modernism:

The Chester Dale Collection

April 18, 2010

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court