partner, the tenor Peter Pears. Honors bestowed on Britten include

Britain’s Companion of Honour in 1953, Order of Merit in 1965, and life

peerage in June 1976.

Programs notes by Elmer Booze

The use ofcameras or recording equipment during

the performance is not allowed. Please he sure that cell

phones, pagers, and other electric devices are turned off

For the convenience ofconcertgoers, the Garden Cafe

remains open until 6:30 p.m. on Sundays.

The Sixty-second Season of

THE WILLIAM NELSON CROMWELL and

F. LAMMOT BELIN CONCERTS

National Gallery of Art

fLJS... 1 -Jgj .JBte.

2472d Concert

BEVERLY BENSO, contralto

PHILLIP SILVER, pianist

Presented in honor ofthe 25th anniversary ofthe East Building

ofthe National Gallery of Art

Sunday Evening, 16 November 2003

Seven O'clock

West Building, West Garden Court

Admission free
Program

I

George Manos German Songs

(1949)

FriihlingsgruB

Ruhe, meine Seele

Die Post

Anton Webern

(1883-1945)

Eight Early Songs

(1901-1904)

Tief von fern

Aufblick

BlumengruB

Bild der Liebe

Sommerabend

Heiter

Der Tod

Heimgang in der Friihe

Beverly Benso and Phillip Silver

II

Franz Schreker

(1878-1934)

Ervin Schulhoff

(1894-1942)

Waldszene,from Der feme Klang

Boston,from Partita fur Klavier

Phillip Silver

Francis Poulenc

(1899-1963)

Mark Fax

(1911-1974)

George Manos

III

La fraicheur et le feu

(1950)

Rayons des yeux

Le matin les branches attisent

Tout disparut

Dans les tenebres du jardin

Unis la fraicheur et le feu

Homme au sourire tendre

La grande riviere qui va

Intermission

IV

Five Black Songs to Poems by Jo Ann Harris

Love

The Refused

Only Dreams

Selfishness

Advice to a Child

Kykleion Asma

(1952)

Morning

Noon

Twilight

Night

Interlinear
Benjamin Britten

(1913-1976)

A Charm of Lullabies

(1947)

A Cradle Song

The Highland Balou

Sephestia’s Lullaby

A Charm

The Nurse’s Song

The Musicians

American contralto Beverly Benso is well known in Washington as a

uniquely gifted singer in her range. She has carried that reputation to all

parts of the world through her appearances as a recitalist and oratorio 

soloist in Germany, Denmark, and Serbia (the former Yugoslavia), and at

the Salzburg Festival in Austria. Benso has also sung at the Spoleto

Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, the Mahler Festival in Canada,

the Phillips Collection, the Cosmos Club, the Smithsonian Institution,

the Library of Congress, and many colleges and universities. She has

been a frequent guest soloist with the National Gallery Orchestra under

the direction of George Manos, performing Kindertoten/ieder by Gustav

Mahler, Johannes Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody, Sir Edward Elgar’s Sea

Pictures, and Richard Bales’ A Set ofJade. Having made her Carnegie

Hall debut in 1990, Beverly Benso is a frequent soloist in oratorio

performances throughout the United States and abroad. Her twenty-fiveyear collaboration with the Washington Bach Consort has included

concerts in Leipzig and Halle, Germany, celebrating the 300th

anniversary ofthe birth ofJohann Sebastian Bach.

A chamber music enthusiast, Benso is a founding member of the

National Gallery Vocal Arts Ensemble. With this ensemble she

performed in twenty-three concerts at the National Gallery as well as at

the Rheingau Festival in Germany, the Musee du Louvre in Paris, and

Schloss Belvedere in Vienna, Austria. Her recordings include Four

Centuries ofSong and Gentle Annie on the Koch label. She has served on

the faculties of the Peabody Conservatory and the University of

Maryland, Baltimore County.

Pianist Phillip Silver is an internationally acclaimed performer,

with enthusiastic reviews to his credit in newspapers from Europe, Asia,

and the United States. The Frankfurter Rundschau described his playing

as “virtuosic.” HaAretz commented upon his “superb technical ability

that enthralled the audience with melody, lyricism and poetry.” The

Boston Globe called him “an international collaborative pianist of the

first rank,” and the Jerusalem Post described him as “a superb

accompanist whose work is marked by sensitivity, felicity of style, and

an inborn musicianship [that] unerringly directs him to the most

appropriate musical gesture.”

Bom in Brooklyn, New York, Silver studied with Katja Andy and

Leonard Shure at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston,

earning the bachelor and master of music degrees, cum laude. He has the

doctor of musical arts degree from the University of Washington, where

his area of research was the music of Ignaz Moscheles. Since the mid1990s, Phillip Silver has carried out extensive research on music and

musicians caught up in the Holocaust. Prior to joining the faculty of the

School of Performing Arts at the University of Maine in Orono, he was a

member of the music faculties of Glasgow University, Strathclyde

University, and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in

Glasgow.

Program Notes

Conductor, composer, and pianist George Manos has been director of

music at the National Gallery of Art and conductor of the National

Gallery Orchestra since 1985. He is also artistic director ofthe American

Music Festival and the National Gallery vocal and chamber ensembles,

which he founded. Manos’ career as a performing pianist and teacher has

included several years on the faculty of The Catholic University of

America in Washington, DC, where he taught piano, conducting, and

chamber music. Manos founded and directed for ten years the renowned

Kilarney Bach Festival in the Republic of Ireland and was the music

director of the 1992 Scandinavian Music Festival in Kolding, Denmark.

His compositions include a Missa brevis for choir and chamber 

orchestra, settings of the Greek Orthodox sacred liturgy, and numerous

songs for solo voice.
Anton Webern was the first composer who was trained as a

musicologist, earning a doctorate in musicology in 1906 from the

University of Vienna, the city of his birth. His professor there was the

outstanding Austrian musicologist Guido Adler (1855-1941), and his

thesis was on the Choralis Constantinus of the Flemish composer 

Heinrich Isaac (1450-1517). In 1904 Webern met his mentor-to-be, the

Austrian-American composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), and

began taking lessons with him as his first student. Webern’s musical life

was greatly influenced by Schoenberg’s teaching and friendship and by

his association with Schoenberg’s other greatly talented pupil, Alban

Berg (1885-1935). The close collaboration of the three men lasted from

1906 to 1912, during which time they introduced a new musical system

centered around Schoenberg’s use of a twelve-tone row. It was a period

of musical experimentation that eschewed the contour of the traditional 

melodic line as well as the harmonic sequence of tonic, subdominant, 

and dominant progressions in favor of atonal relationships. Webern’s

musical oeuvre is relatively small, consisting of only thirty-one original

works, but it presents the twelve-tone compositional technique 

thoroughly and skillfully.

Francis Poulenc, a native of Paris, was a member of Les Six, six

French composers who were grouped together in the second decade of

the twentieth century by the French pianist and music critic Henri Collet.

(The other five composers in the group were Georges Auric, Louis

Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, and Germaine Tailleferre.) 

Poulenc studied piano in his youth with the Spanish pianist Ricardo

Vines (1875-1943), but in composition he was basically self-taught. His

first successful composition was the Rapsodie negre, published in 1919.

He was already accepted as a composer by the wider public when he

undertook formal lessons in composition from 1921 to 1924 with the

French composer and teacher Charles Koechlin (1867-1950). Poulenc

also enjoyed high respect as a pianist and accompanist. He undertook 

extensive tours with his friend, the noted baritone Pierre Bernac (1899—

1979), for whom he composed many of his songs.

Composer Mark Fax, who was born in Baltimore, Maryland,

began his early music studies at age nine and by the age offourteen was a

theater organist in Baltimore’s Regent Theater. His undergraduate studies

took place at Syracuse University, where he received the bachelor of

music degree with honors. He attended the Eastman School of Music in

Rochester, New York, where he received the master of music degree in

1945. At Eastman he was a composition student of Howard Hanson

(1896-1981), who was also the teacher of the first National Gallery 

music director, Richard Bales. Fax also studied under Bernard Rogers

(1893-1968), whose students included, among others, Vladimir 

Ussachevsky (1911-1990), Peter Mennin (1923-1983), Dominick

Argento (b. 1927), and David Diamond (b. 1915). Fax’s piano teacher at

Eastman was Cecile Staub Genhart (1898-1983), who was actively

teaching up to the year of her death. Fax continued his studies toward a

doctorate at New York University from 1945 to 1946. His musical career

included positions as organist, teacher, administrator, and composer. A

Fellow ofthe American Guild of Organists, he was the organist and choir

director at several churches in the Washington area, with his longest

tenure at Asbury United Methodist Church (1951-1974). His long and

productive career as a teacher took him to many colleges in the South,

culminating at Howard University (1947-1973), where he taught music

theory before assuming the position of director of the School of Music in

1972. Fax wrote in all genres of music, ranging from piano pieces to two

full-length operas, Christmas Miracle (1958) and Till Victory Is Won

(1967). Among his honors and awards were a Rosenwald Fellowship and

membership in the All-University Honor Society.

Benjamin Britten, a native of Lowestoft, Suffolk, England, is

considered the leading British composer of the mid-twentieth century. A

brilliant composer of operas, he was also regarded as a first-rate pianist

and conductor. Britten studied at the Royal College of Music in London

with British composers Frank Bridge (1879-1941) and John Ireland

(1879-1961) as well as the Australian pianist, teacher, and composer 

Arthur Benjamin (1893-1960). As a composer of song cycles, Britten

reached his peak with Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo (1940) and The

Holy Sonnets of John Donne (1945), written for his friend and recital