A Bitter Love

Li Po (701-763 A.D.)

How beautiful she looks,

Opening the pearly casement,

And how quietly she leans,

And how troubled her brow is.

You may see the tears now,

Tears white on her cheek!

But not the man she so bitterly loves.

How beautiful she looks ...

Tears

Wang Seng-Ju (c. 550 A.D.)

Higho’er the hill the moon-barque steers.

The lantern lights depart.

Dead springs are stirring in my heart-

And there are tears.

But that which makes my grief more deep

Is that you know not whenI weep.

The River and the Leaf

PoChu-I (772-846 A.D.)

Into the night the sounds of luting flow;

The west wind stirs amid the rootcrop blue,

While envious fireflies spoil the twinkling dew,

And early wild geese stem the dark Kim Ho.

Now great trees tell their secrets to the sky,

And hill on hill looms in the moon-clear night. I watch one leaf upon the river light;

And ina dream, go drifting down the Hwai. A Feast of Lanterns

Yuan Mei (1715-1797 A.D.)

In spring, for sheer delight,

I set the lanterns swinging through the trees.

Bright as the myriad argosies of the night

That ride the clouded billows of the sky.

Red dragons leap and plunge through cold and silver seas;

And, oh, my garden, gleaming cold and white,

Thou hast outshone the far, faint moon on high!

At the Kuang-Li Pavilion

SuTung-Po’ (1036-1101 A.D.)

Red-skirted ladies, robed for fairyland, all are flown;

But my heart, to the wail of their long reed pipes, lilts on.

Their clarion songs,‘mid the wandering clouds, were blown.

The tiny waisted dreamily dancing girls are gone.

Keeping the New Year’s Watch at Gh’in Chou

Chang-Yueh (667-730 A.D.)

The old year ends with tonight;

A new round comes with the dawn.

But the sadness of autumn still lingers in my heart,

As the dipper’s handle turns northeast,

Whither

I would be, when spring returns.

New Year’s Song

Anonymous

In the land of Shu,

The winter home is like the warmth of spring at home.

Already, on the first morning of the turn,

The early plum puts forth,

Bent on surprising with unexpected petals the stranger from afar,

For whom another year of exile comes!

Lines from the Tomb of an Unknown Woman

Anonymous

Mother of pity, hear my prayer!

That, in the endless round of birth,

No more may break my heart on earth;

Nor by the windless waters of the blest, weary of rest;

That drifting, drifting,I abide not anywhere.

Yet, if by karma’s law,I must resume this mantle of the dust,

Grant me,I pray, one dewdrop from thy willow spray;

And, in the double lotus, keep my hidden heart asleep.

The regularseason ofconcerts at the National Gallery willresume on October 4, 1998,

withaperformance by the National Gallery Orchestra, George Manos conducting.

In memoriam

Richard H. Bales

1915-1998

2228th Concert

National Gallery Orchestra

George Manos, conductor

Beverly Benso, contralto, guest artist

A concert honoring the memory ofthe National

Gallery'sfirst music director

National Gallery of Art

Sunday Evening, July 12, 1998

7:00O’clock

West Building, West Garden Court

Admissionfree
PROGRAM

George Frideric Handel Suite inF Major from“Water Music”

(1685-1759) Arranged for Symphony Orchestra

by Sir Hamilton Harty

Allegro

Air: Andante

Bouree: Vivace

Hornpipe: Delicato, ma con brio

Andante espressivo

Allegro deciso

Richard BalesA Set ofJade

(1915-1998) for Mezzo-soprano and Orchestra (1964) A Bitter Love

Tears

The River and the Leaf A Feast of Lanterns

At the Kuang-Li Pavilion

Keeping the New Year’s Watch at Ch’in Chou

New Year’s Song

Lines from the Tomb of an Unknown Woman

Joseph Haydn Symphony No. 45 in F-sharp Minor

(1732-1809)“Farewell” (1772)

Allegro assai

Adagio

Menuet: Allegretto

Finale: Presto

The audience is requestedto refrainfrom applause.

Theprogram will beperformedwithout intermission.

The use ofcameras or recording equipment

during theperformance is not allowed.

Richard Horner Bales was born February 3, 1915 in Alexandria,

Virginia, the son of Henry Ahijah Bales and Henrietta Wyeth

(Horner) Bales. He attended Alexandria public schools and the

Episcopal High School in that city, from which he graduated in 

1932. From 1932 to 1936 he attended the Eastman School ofMu­

sic in Rochester, New York, earning the bachelor of music degree.

From 1939 to 1941 Bales wasa conducting fellow at the Juilliard

School of Music in New York City, and he spent the summer of

1940 at the Tanglewood Music Center in Boston asa private pupil

of Serge Koussevitsky. Among his classmates that summer were

Leonard Bernstein and Lukas Foss.

Upon returning to Washington in 1941, Bales was drawn quickly

into the war effort, serving on the staffthat decoded cables for the

British Embassy. That same year, he succeeded in having one of

his compositions performed by the National Symphony. One of

the members of the audience on that occasion was Mrs. Dorothy

Godfrey, who was a close friend ofthe director ofthe newly-opened

National Gallery ofArt, David E. Finley. She recommended Bales 

as the composer of the score for the Gallery’s first publicity film, 

Your National Gallery. Mr. Finley not only commissioned Bales to

write the score, but also called upon him again in 1943, when the

Gallery’s program of presenting Sunday night concerts for enlisted

personnel and the general public began to grow intoa major project.

Finley appointed Bales as the director ofthat project, which evolved

into an ongoing concert series. That appointment was the begin­

ning ofa life-long career for Bales, who held the post of assistant to

the director for music at the Gallery until his retirement in 1985.

During his forty-two-year tenure, Richard Bales brought distinc­

tion to the National Gallery on numerous occasions and in various

ways. In addition to organizing and presenting 1,786 concerts at

the Gallery and conducting more than five hundred of them, he

guest conducted some thirty orchestras throughout the United

States. He served as interim music director of the National Sym­

phony Orchestra in 1947 and composed more than thirty-five works

of music, among them five National Gallery Suites. His suites based

upon music ofthe American Revolution (TheRepublic) and the Civil 

War (The Union and The Confederacy) were issued as LP albums in

1960 by Columbia Records. The Civil War recordings were reis­

sued in the early 1990s as Sony Classical CDs. Under Bales’ direc­

tion, the National Gallery Orchestra performed at theWhite House

during the terms of Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson.

Bales wasa constant champion of the works of other American

composers and in 1944 founded an American Music Festival at the

Gallery. Continuing on an annual basis to the present day, the

American Music Festival is the longest-running festival dedicated

to the works of American composers and has been the scene of

more than three hundred world premiere performances. One of

the most significant of these was the first performance, more than

fifty years after its composition, of the First Symphony of Charles

Ives, which Richard Bales conducted at the Gallery in 1953.

Bales was accorded numerous honors by prestigious organizations

both in the United States and abroad, includinga Citation from 

the Washington Board of Trade (1952), the Award of Merit from 

the National Association ofAmerican Composers and Conductors

(1959), Washingtonian ofthe Year (1981), the Cosmos Club Award

(1985), and the Officer’s Cross of the Republic of Austria. This

last award was bestowed on him in 1990 by the Austrian Ambassa­

dor to the United States in recognition of his having initiated and

conducted for twentyyears the Gallery’s annual GalaViennese New

Year Concert. An endowed scholarship was established in his honor

in 1988 at the Shenandoah Conservatory of Music in Winchester,

Virginia, and he has been listed in Who's Who in America since 1958.

Bales wasa member ofthe Cosmos Club, the American Society of

Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), the American Fed­

eration ofMusicians, the American Federation ofRadio and Televi­

sion Artists, and the Bruckner Society in America. His interest in

history was reflected by his membership in The Society ofthe Cin­

cinnati, the Civil War Round Table ofWashington, and the Sons of

Confederate Veterans.

Both Richard Bales and his wife, Betty, who died in 1997, were fre­

quent visitors to the Gallery after his retirement. They will be sorely

missed here and in all the venues they graced with their presence.

The title of Bales’ A Set ofJade refers to the Chinese custom of

collecting and displayingjade objects in groups that have a unifying

theme. In the case of the poems the composer selected, they are

unified not only by their origin in Chinese literature, but also by

their use of imagery from nature to symbolize human emotions.

Even without the texts, these eight pieces would belong together

asa set, given their transparent textures and peaceful rhythms.