November 2002 (continued)

17 Rosa Lamoreaux,

soprano, and Betty

Bullock, pianist

24 New Zealand String

Quartet

To be announced

(Replacing contralto Beverly

Benso, whose program will be

presented at a later date)

Borodin: Quartet No. 2

Szekely: Quartet (1937)

Beethoven: Quartet, Op. 59/2

December 1, 8, and 15: The 60th American Music Festival

1 Philip Quint, violinist

David Riley, pianist

8 Washington Men’s

Camerata

Frank Albinder, music

director

15 The American Chamber

Ensemble

22 Cantate Chamber Singers

Gisele Becker, music

director

29 Luigi Piovano, cellist

Luisa Prayer, pianist

Foss: Three American Pieces

Gershwin/Heifetz: Excerpts from

Porgy and Bess

Corigliano: Sonata (1963)

Songs for the Holiday Season by

Conrad Susa and other American

Composers

Muczynski: Fantasy Trio

Moore: Quintet for Clarinet and

Strings

Schickele: Serenade for Three

Christmas music by Benjamin

Britten

Sonatas by Brahms, Schumann,

and Saint-Saens

The Sixty-first Season of

THE WILLIAM NELSON CROMWELL and

F. LAMMOT BELIN CONCERTS

National Gallery of Art

2432d Concert

CAROL WINCENC,flutist

STEPHEN GOSLING, pianist

Sunday Evening, 3 November 2002

Seven O’clock

West Building, West Garden Court

Admission free
PROGRAM

Lukas Foss Three American Pieces

(b. 1922) (1944)

Early Song

Dedication

Composer’s Holiday

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Sonata in G Minor for Flute and Piano

(1714-1788) S. 1020/Anh. Ill, 184

Claude Debussy

(1862-1918)

Edgar Varese

(1883-1965)

Allegro moderato

Adagio

Allegro

Syrinx

(1912)

Density 21.5

(1936)

The audience is requested not to applaud between these

two selections

Paul Schoenfield

(b. 1947)

Slovakian Children’s Songs

(1997)

Intro

Hopfrog

Romanza

Furiant

INTERMISSION

Georges Enesco

(1881-1955)

Cantabile and Presto

(1904)

Valentines for Carol

Roberto Sierra, b. 1953

Lukas Foss

Joan Tower, b. 1938

Paul Schoenfield

Daniel Paget

Eros(1999)

Valentine (1995)

Valentine Trills (1996)

Achat Sha’alti (2001)

Ufaratsta (2001)

Romania!

(1978)

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.

The Artists

One of the current generation’s most respected and acclaimed flutists,

Carol Wincenc has appeared as a soloist with major orchestras

worldwide and has premiered works written for her by numerous 

prominent composers. In 1994 she performed the world premiere, with

the Detroit Symphony, of Pulitzer Prize-winner Christopher Rouse’s

Flute Concerto. In addition, she played the world premiere of Henryk

Gorecki’s Concerto-Cantata at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw in 1992

and its United States premiere with the Chicago Symphony in 1995. A

recipient of the first prize in the Walter W. Naumburg Solo Flute

Competition, Wincenc was a solo recitalist at the National Flute

Convention in 2000. In great demand as a chamber musician, she has

collaborated with the Guarneri, Emerson, Tokyo, and Cleveland String

Quartets and has performed with sopranos Jessye Norman and Elly

Ameling, pianist Emanuel Ax, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Wincenc also

plays regularly as the flutist of the New York Woodwind Quintet. She is

a professor of flute at both the Juilliard School of Music in New York

and the State University of New York in Stony Brook.
Carol Wincenc’s many recordings include an all-American disc with

pianist Samuel Sanders and composers/pianists David Del Tredici and

Lukas Foss (Nonesuch) and the complete Mozart flute quartets with the

Emerson String Quartet (Deutsche Grammophon). She appears at the

National Gallery by arrangement with Trawick Artists Management of

New York City.

Pianist Stephen Gosling is currently completing his doctorate at

the Juilliard School of Music, where he also received the bachelor and

master of music degrees. Among his academic honors are the Mennin

Prize for Outstanding Excellence and Leadership in Music and the Sony

Elevated Standards Fellowship. He has given numerous concerto

performances, including the Corigliano Piano Concerto with the Juilliard

Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin, Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue with the

Hudson Valley Philharmonic, and the European premiere of Paul

Schoenfield’s Four Parables with the Dutch Radio Philharmonic under

Lukas Foss. Gosling has also collaborated with the Orpheus Chamber 

Orchestra, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Orchestra 

of St. Luke’s, Continuum, the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, Da

Camera of Houston, and the New Juilliard Ensemble. He has been

featured in four seasons of the Summergarden Series at MOMA, the

Friedheim Composition Award at the Kennedy Center, the Grant Park

Festival of Chicago, and New York’s Bang on a Can festival. He has

been heard on radio stations WQXR and WNYC, and has recorded for

Decca and New World Records. In addition to performing regularly with

Carol Wincenc, Stephen Gosling is a member of the New York New

Music Ensemble.

The Musical Selections

Composed when Lukas Foss was twenty-two years old, Three American

Pieces was intended to represent quintessential musical Americana. The

original work was scored for violin and piano. In 1984, forty years later,

Foss re-scored the work for flute and piano at the suggestion of Carol

Wincenc. The first piece, Early Song, features mood swings that wander

between pensive songlike poems and accelerated rhythmic passages

spiced with unexpected meter shifts. Dedication is in an ABA format,

using a slow, fast, slow pattern. Foss has the flutist playing glissandos

between half steps by sliding off the keys of an open-hole flute. Marked

Allegro, Composer’s Holiday requires the flutist to sing rhythmically on

the note A while at the same time playing above it a melody that extends

the range of the flute to an E that is three octaves above middle C.

The Sonata in G Minor for Flute and Piano was assigned the

number 1020 in the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV) of the works of J. S.

Bach; however, the famous lexicographer Wolfgang Schmieder did so

with the proviso that the work’s authorship was doubtful. Subsequent

scholarship has revealed that it was actually written by Carl Philipp

Emanuel Bach. The sonata is in three movements, beginning with the

opening Allegro moderato that has an elongated introductory solo for

piano. The second movement (Adagio) contrasts expressively held long

notes for the flute with a continuous flow of scale passages in the

accompanying piano part. The finale (Allegro) sparkles with joviality,

which prevails throughout the movement.

Debussy’s Syrinx was originally entitled La flute de Pan and was

a piece of incidental music that was to accompany the death scene of Pan

in the play Psyche by the French dramatist Gabriel Mourey (1865-1943).

Like the Varese piece that follows it, Syrinx is an exercise in musical

brevity for unaccompanied flute. As described by the writer Carlo

Marinelli (translated by Helen Baker), it is a “short work of a smoky

languor, reminiscent of the more celebrated Prelude a I'apres midi d’un

fauneF

Density 21.5, by Edgar Varese, is an extraordinarily difficult

work for solo flute that is, at the same time, more accessible than any of

his other works. The piece was composed at the request of flutist

Georges Barrere (1876-1944), who owned a platinum instrument. The

density of platinum is measured at 21.5, hence the title.

Composer Paul Schoenfield writes about the Slovakian

Children’s Songs: “[These songs] were jointly commissioned by Carol

Wincenc and the Hoeschler family of Minnesota. Several years ago,

Linda Hoeschler (nee Lovas) who, like Carol, is also of Slovak descent,

had asked that I compose something in honor of the Lovas family. The

birth of Carol’s daughter, Nicola, nourished the decision to base the work
on children’s music, and in the end the suite, Slovakian Children's

Songs, resulted. In technical terms, these pieces fall in between

arrangements and original compositions. Certain folk tunes are quoted

verbatim, but more often than not they are paraphrased or embedded into

an overall texture [that] masks their presence.”

In his Cantabile and Presto, Georges Enesco provides the listener 

an intimate glimpse of his passionate nature as a composer. The pianist

begins the work with an ostinato figure in E-flat major. A flute melody of

striking beauty and charisma ensues. As the ostinato continues, it takes

on an increasing degree of intricacy, while the beguilingly simple melody

is transformed by the introduction of leaps and circulated arpeggios. The

piano continues with a series of chords followed by a Presto segment of

sardonic and capricious ambience. Enesco enhances the passage by the

contiguous crashing juxtaposition of three against four rhythmic patterns.

After an ascending chromatic scale that is marked pianississimo, the

work ends abruptly on a fortissimo high G.

Carol Wincenc selected the five Valentines for Carol for this

program. She describes the first one as follows: “Roberto [Sierra] told

me that almost immediately after I asked him to write a valentine the

image of Eros, the god of love, came into mind. Ever searching for

victims, Eros is accompanied by hundreds of cupids with wings flapping

and fluttering and arrows darting about, thus the rapid-fire trills and runs

in both flute and piano parts. The habanera in the second half of the

piece is a kind of love dance that is seductive and sensuous. I love

playing this piece since the imagery is so clearly expressed in the music.”

In the case of Lukas Foss’ Valentine, she says: “After leaving [his] first

[failed 1 attempt completely, [Lukas Foss] recalled an earlier piece,

coincidentally, that he wrote in the year of my birth for solo piano, [and]

of which he was extremely fond. Out of this came [Valentine,] a

hauntingly beautiful and highly expressive duo for flute and piano.” In

the case of Valentine Trills, by Joan Tower, and the pieces by Paul

Schoenfield, Wincenc explains: “[Valentine Trills] is somewhat

reminiscent of certain movements that appear in Snow Dreams, a duo for

flute and guitar that was commissioned by Sharon Isbin [and Carol

Wincenc] in 1983. Paul Schoenfield’s two valentines (the fourth and fifth

in the series), Achat Sha'alti and Ufaratsta, are based on Jewish folk

songs. The text of Achat Sha’alti is taken from the fourth verse of Psalm

27 of David. [Schoenfield’s] deeply religious beliefs and love of all

forms of jazz and improvisation are everywhere evidenced in these two

short works, which we recorded on the New World Recording label.”

Carol Wincenc commissioned Romania! by Daniel Paget when

she won the prestigious Naumburg Competition in 1978. Wincenc had

heard folk melodies of irresistible charm and appeal while touring

Romania and requested Paget to create a work based on them. The

character and variety of the melodies, ranging from sensuous lyricism to

utterly breathtaking energy, delighted and inspired the composer. Built

on modal scales and unusual rhythms, the twelve-minute work begins

with the haunting sound of a lone shepherd’s pipe and ends in the

whirlwind of a swirling peasant dance. After its first performance, the

New York Times critic said the work and the performance by Carol

Wincenc “raised the audience to heaven.”

Program notes by Elmer Booze

For the convenience ofconcertgoers

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

Concerts at the National Gallery of Art

Under the direction of George Manos

November and December 2002

Faure: Nocturne in D-flat Major

Albeniz: Iberia, Book I

Hersch: 24 Variations on a Bach

Chorale

November

10 Jeffrey Kahane, pianist