1806). The Gozzi libretto is also the basis of Puccini’s Turandot,

composed several years after Busoni’s opera was completed. Busoni

imported the tune of the English ballad Greensleeves, which he believed

to have been of Chinese origin.

When he unveiled his formidable Twenty-four Caprices for Solo

Violin, the legendary Italian violinist Nicolo Paganini (1782-1840)

stepped into the realm of violin sorcery. His musical presence and

pyrotechnics bedazzled both the violinists and the pianists of his day.

Among the latter, none was more under Paganini’s hypnotic power than

Liszt, the reigning keyboard figure of the nineteenth century. Liszt

composed an equally imposing set of etudes for the piano entitled Six

etudes d'execution transcendente d’apres Paganini, from which the

third, known as La campanella (The Bell), is the most famous. These

etudes were deemed unplayable by almost everyone except Liszt himself.

In response to his critics, he revised them in 1851, in an edition that

proved just as intimidating as the earlier version.

Busoni, also greatly admired as a pianist and a direct descendant

of the Lisztian style of performance, felt the urge to enlarge the piano

repertoire and at the same time pay homage to both Paganini and Liszt.

Busoni revised the Liszt Paganini Etudes in 1911, incorporating

measures that Liszt had earlier discarded and reworking them for the

piano from Paganini’s original score. The resulting grand fire is the work

of a visionary genius who incorporated octaves, trills, repeated notes,

chromatic runs, and wide leaps with his own musical intricacies and

embellishments. For the audiences who first heard them, these devices

were overwhelming and lent credence to the legend that Paganini’s art

was of devilish inspiration. In the context of contemporary performance, 

they recreate the magnitude of Paganini’s impact on his listeners.

Program notes by Elmer Booze

For the convenience of concertgoers

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

The Sixty-first Season of

THE WILLIAM NELSON CROMWELL and

F. LAMMOT BELIN CONCERTS

National Gallery of Art

2449th Concert

GARRICK OHLSSON, pianist

Sunday Evening, 2 March 2003

Seven O’clock

West Building, East Garden Court

Admission free
Program

Johann Sebastian Bach/Busoni Prelude and Fugue in E-flat Major

(1685-1750) (“Saint Anne”)

Franz Liszt Sonata in B Minor

(1811-1886) (1851)

Lento assai

Recitativo

Allegro energico

(Movements played without pause)

Intermission

Ferruccio Busoni All'Italia from “Elegies”

(1866-1924) (In modo napolitano) (1907)

Sonatina No. 2

(II tutto vivace, fantastico, con energia, capriccio e sentimento)

(1912)

Sonatina No. 6

(Sonatina super Carmen—Chamber fantasy)

(Allegro deciso) (1920)

Turandofs Boudoir from “Elegies”

(Intermezzo) (1907)

Liszt /Busoni Paganini Etude No. 3

(“La campanella”) (1883)

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 Musician

Since his triumph as winner of the 1970 Chopin International Piano

Competition, American pianist Garrick Ohlsson has established himself 

worldwide as a musician of extraordinary interpretive power and

prodigious technical facility. Although he has long been regarded as one

of the world’s leading exponents of the music of Chopin, Ohlsson

commands an enormous repertoire that encompasses virtually the entire

piano literature. A student of the late Claudio Arrau, Ohlsson has come

to be noted for his masterly performances of the works of Mozart,

Beethoven, and Schubert as well as the romantic repertoire. His concerto

repertoire alone is unusually wide and eclectic, ranging from Haydn and

Mozart to twentieth-century masters, and he has at his command 

approximately eighty works for piano and orchestra.

Garrick Ohlsson is an avid chamber musician and has

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

Quartets, to name just a few. Together with violinist Jorja Fleezanis and

cellist Michael Grebnier, he is a founding member of the San Franciscobased FOG Trio. A prolific recording artist, Ohlsson can be heard on the

Arabesque, RCA Victor Red Seal, Angel, Bridge, BMG, Delos, 

Hanssler, Nonesuch, Telarc, and Virgin Classics labels. He has recorded

the complete solo works of Chopin for Arabesque. In reviewing volume

ten of the set (Etudes), the Boston Globe gives this account: “[Ohlsson’s]

set of the Etudes is one of the greatest recordings of these pieces ever

made. The legato Etudes are incomparable for their long-spanned

phrasing, [and] the fast Etudes are just as rich in detail as the slow ones.

Ohlsson surprises and captivates by his dynamic control, the emergence

of inner voices, [and] the play of rubato against the strong ongoing

rhythm.”

Born in White Plains, New York, Ohlsson began piano studies at

the age of eight. He attended the Westchester Conservatory of Music

until the age of thirteen, at which time he entered the Juilliard School of

Music in New York City. While in high school, he demonstrated an

extraordinary aptitude for mathematics and languages, but the concert
stage remained his true passion. His musical development has been

influenced in completely different ways by a succession of distinguished 

pianists and teachers, most notably Claudio Arrau, Olga Barabini, Tom

Lishman, Sascha Gorodnitzki, Rosina Lhevinne, and Irma Wolpe.

Although he won first prizes at the Busoni Competition in Italy and the

1968 Montreal Competition, it was his triumph at the Chopin 

Competition in Warsaw that brought him worldwide recognition as one

of the finest pianists of his generation. Since that time, he has made

nearly a dozen tours of Poland where, to this day, he remains virtually a

national hero. Garrick Ohlsson was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize in

1964 and received the 1988 University of Michigan Musical Society s

Distinguished Artist Award. He appears at the National Gallery by

arrangement with ICM Artists, Limited, of New York City.

Program Notes

Johann Sebastian Bach composed his Prelude and Fugue in E-jlat Major

(“Saint Anne”) for the organ in 1729 and included it in his compendium 

of masterpieces for keyboard instruments, the KlavierUbung, Part III.

Busoni transcribed the prelude and fugue for the piano in 1890, the same

year he married Gerda Sjostrand, the daughter of a Swedish sculptor. The

fugue theme coincidentally contains exactly the same notes as the fiist 

phrase of a hymn tune, Saint Anne, by William Crolt (1678-1727). The

tune was sung in England to Isaac Watts text, O God, Oui Help in Ages

Past, throughout much of the eighteenth century. By the time Bach s Eflat Fugue was introduced in England in the nineteenth century, every

listener recognized the familiar hymn in the fugue theme, and the

nickname Saint Anne has been attached to it in the English-speaking 

world ever since.

Liszt dedicated his Sonata in B Minor to Robeit Schumann in

return for Schumann’s dedication to Liszt of his well-known C Major

Fantasy. The sonata contained so many daring innovations that many

who attended the first performance could not endure it to the end. The

work has been characterized by some critics as technically self-defeating 

and sophisticated to the point of vagueness, but it is nevertheless

acknowledged by pianists as a monumental work of prophetic cleverness

and intellect. The visionary coda, with its bells tolling in the distance,

brings the sonata to a mystical close that calls to mind Liszt’s lifelong

vacillation between the secular and spiritual emotional worlds.

Busoni originally composed six Elegies for the piano in 1907, but

added a seventh, entitled Berceuse (Elegiaque), on the occasion of the

death of his mother. As the second work in this collection, All’Italia

mimics a Neapolitan song and incorporates several themes that Busoni

had used in his Piano Concerto, Op. 39, written between 1903 and 1904.

Each of the Elegies is dedicated to one of Busoni’s disciples. All’Italia is

dedicated to Egon Petri (1881-1962), a celebrated German pianist and

teacher of Dutch descent.

Busoni also wrote a set of six Sonatinas, which he completed

between 1910 and 1920. These years encapsulated his accelerated

musical growth, going from late nineteenth-century romanticism to

expressionism and neoclassicism and finally to the matter-of-fact

approach of the later twentieth century. Sonatina No. 2 boasts Busoni’s

advanced harmonic development and exploits the economical sonatina

form. The piece is the most forward-looking of the set. “The music’s

seeming unpredictability is, on closer scrutiny, entirely logical. Its mood

inhabits the shadowy dream world between sleep and awakening—a

fantastic landscape, suggested perhaps by E.T.A. Hoffmann” (Paul

Jacobs, 1930-1983). Sonatina No. 6, subtitled Super Carmen or Carmen

Fantasy, was a favorite of the noted Polish-American pianist, pedagogue,

and composer Edward Steuermann (1892-1964), a pupil of Busoni.

Steuermann said of the work: “The Carmen Fantasy does not pretend to

be a brilliant ‘concert-paraphrase.’ [It] is a rather introspective work; the

well-known melodies, sometimes changed in character or tempo, are

presented in a reflective mood. Here the Concert-Fantasy, once designed

to arouse the cheers of the concert crowd, changes into the loving,

serious meditations of an almost lonely artist.”

The fourth of Busoni’s Seven Elegies is entitled Turandot’s

Erauengemach (Turandot’s Boudoir). Busoni wrote a short opera 

entitled Turandot, basing his own libretto on that of Carlo Gozzi (1720-