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 ofthe 

West Building after 6:30 pm is not permitted.

For the convenience of concertgoers, 

the Garden Cafe remains open for light refreshments

until 6:00 pm on Sundays.

Music Department

National Gallery ofArt

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue nw

Washington, DC

www.nga.gov

Concerts are made possible in part through the generosity of donors

to the National Gallery ofArt through The Circle. Reserved seating is

available in recognition oftheir support. Please contact the development

office at (202) 842-6450 or circle@nga.gov for more information.

The Seventy-first Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery ofArt

2,905th Concert

Mak Grgic, guitarist

Stephen Ackert, organist

Presented in honor of

Imperial Augsburg:

Renaissance Prints and Drawings, 1475 - 1540

October 7, 2012

Sunday, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Admissionfree
Program

Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger (c. 1580-1651)

Toccata no. 6

Gagliarda no. 5

Arranged for solo guitar by Male Grgic

Heinrich Isaac (c. 1450-1517)

Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen

Cannen in Fa

La Morra

Arranged for solo guitar by Male Grgic

Sylvius Leopold Weiss (1687-1750)

Suite: L’lnfidele

Entree

Courante

Sarabande 

Menue 

Musette 

Paisanne

Arranged for solo guitar by Petr Saidl

Karl Ignaz Augustin Kohaut (1726-1784)

Lute Concerto in F major

Allegro

Adagio

Tempo di Minuetto

Arranged for guitar and organ by Hans Neemann and Stephen Ackert

INTERMISSION

Weiss

Passacaglia in D Major

Arranged for solo guitar by Male Grgic and Christopher Parleening

Adam Falckenhagen (1697-1754)

Suite in A Major

Marcia

Minuetto 

Allegretto

Arranged for solo guitar by Siegfried Behrend

Francesco da Milano (1497-1543)

Three Fantasias and a Ricercare

Giovanni Zamboni (c. 1675-c. 173°)

Sonata vn

Allemanda 

Sarabanda

Sonata xn

Ceccona

Arranged for solo guitar by Mak Grgic
The Musicians

MAIC GRGIC

Already at age twenty-five, Mak Grgic is a veteran of numerous concerts in 

venues throughout the world, including the Atrium ofthe City Museum

of Ljubljana, Cankarjev Dom, and Piran Music Nights in Slovenia and the

Guitar Festival Mikulov in the Czech Republic. Frequently invited to perform in the United States, he has been featured in the Allegro Guitar Series 

in Texas and the Sandpoint Festival in Spokane as well as at the Newman

Center for the Performing Arts in Denver; Pepperdine University in California; the Portland Classical Guitar Festival in Oregon; and Strathmore Flail in

Bethesda, Maryland. Recent and upcoming performances include concerts

in Croatia, Italy, Portugal, Slovakia, and Spain as well as Dallas, Texas and

Lancaster, Ohio. Fie joined the renowned jack Quartet for the premiere of

a new guitar quintet by the young Slovenian composer Nina Senk, and

has recorded music for the film White Camellias, starring Cybill Shepherd.

Grgic’s artistry has been the subject ofreviews in Germany’s Thuringische

Landeszeitung, Italy’s II Messaggero and Chitarra Classica, Slovenia’s family

magazine Jana, Croatia’s Jutamji List, and the United Kingdom’s Classical

Guitar Magazine as well as the Columbus Dispatch in Ohio.

In 2011 Grgic took first prize at the Guitar Competition Luigi Mozzani in

Italy and the Pacific Guitar Festival and Competition in California. Previously,

he earned highest prizes at the Andres Segovia International Competition

for young guitarists in Velbert, Germany; Forum Gitarre Wien International

Competition in Vienna, Austria; International Guitar Competition in Arrenzano,

Italy; Anna Amalia Competition for young guitarists in Weimar, Germany;

International Guitarart Festival and Competition in Belgrade, Serbia; and

the European Classical Guitar Competition “Enrico Mercatali” in Italy.

4

Born in 1987 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Grgic follows a distinguished line of

guitarists from the Croatian school of guitar playing. In Zagreb he studied

with Ante Cagalj at the Elly Basic Conservatory of Music. Grgic went on to

study at the Universitat fur Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna, Austria, under the tutelage ofAlvaro Pierri. He is currently pursuing a master’s

degree at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music

as a student ofWilliam Kanengiser. He appears at the National Gallery of

Art by arrangement with Serious Music Media, www.seriousmusicmedia.com.

STEPHEN ACKERT

Now in his ninth year as head ofthe music department at the National Gallery

of Art, Stephen Ackert studied the organ at Oberlin College; Northwestern

University; the Hochschule fur Musik in Frankfurt am Main, Germany; and

the University ofWisconsin in Madison, where he completed his doctoral

studies in 1974. A resident ofthe Washington area since 1979, he has performed at the Kennedy Center, the National Cathedral, and the National Shrine

ofthe Immaculate Conception. In 2008 he undertook his ninth recital tour

ofhistoric concert halls and churches in Germany, and in 2010 and 2012 he

played for national conventions ofthe American Liszt Society.

In addition to regular presentation ofhis lectures and preconcert talks on

the interrelationships between music and art at the National Gallery, Ackert

has lectured at the Amalfi Coast Music and Art Festival in Italy; the Austrian,

German, and Italian embassies in Washington; the Kennedy Center; and the

Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

5
Program Notes

With a storied past and a strong imperial presence, Augsburg enjoyed a

golden age in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Home to Hans

Holbein, the preferred painter of England’s Henry vm, the city fostered

artists such as Hans Burgkmair, Erhard Ratdolt, Daniel Hopfer, Jorg Breu, 

and Hans Weiditz. Operating in the liminal space between the Habsburg

court and the city’s own art market, visual artists flourished from about 1475,

as the effects ofthe Italian Renaissance were first being felt, through the

social, political, and religious upheavals ofthe Reformation, which took hold

in 1537 following twenty years ofstruggle. This rich and varied history is told

through some 100 works in the exhibition Imperial Augsburg: Renaissance

Prints and Drawings, 1475-1340. Focusing on drawings, prints, and illustrated books as well as the innovative printing techniques that were new

at the time, the exhibition is the first ofits kind in the United States. Organized by the National Gallery ofArt and supported in part by a generous

grant from the Thaw Charitable Trust, the exhibition remains on view in

the West Building until December 31, 2012.

As one ofthe most prosperous and powerful city-states in the “Holy

Roman Empire ofthe German Nation,” as the confederation called itself

after 1474, Augsburg attracted many musicians as well as artists during the

late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Musicians with municipal

salaries were incorporated into the Stadtpfeiferei (municipal band), and

lutenists, representatives ofthe so-called stille Musik (quiet music), also 

flourished in the city. Several ornate manuscripts attest to the rich musical

life ofAugsburg’s middle class during the late Middle Ages: the Augsburger

Liederbuch (1454), containing love songs and student songs; the Liederbuch of

Clara Hatzerlin (1470-1471); and an anthology oflieder found among the

possessions ofthe patrician family Horwart (1458-1513). The first large retail

stock of printed music in southern Germany was established in Augsburg

by Georg Wilier (active 1550-1575), who published his first catalogue for the

Frankfurt Book Fair of 1564.

6

Emperor Maximilian 1 (1459-1519) showed particularly good taste (or

perhaps good luck) in hiring as chapel musicians Heinrich Isaac, Ludwig

Senfl (c. 1485-1542), and Paul Hofhaimer (1459-1537)- On the occasion ofthe

Augsburg Imperial Diet in 1510, prominent musicians, including Sebastian

Virdung (c. 1465-c. 1530) and Othmar Luscinius (c. 1480-1537), responded

to invitations from the clergy and royalty in Augsburg to provide music for 

the masses and solemn assemblies associated with the Diet. Charles v (1500-

2558), who succeeded Maximilian as Holy Roman Emperor, had a personal

enthusiasm for music and some skill in singing and composing. Some of

the greatest composers ofthe age worked for him, including Jacobus Clemens

(c. 1510-c. 1555), Nicolas Gombert (c. 1495-c. 1560), and Cristobal de

Morales (c. 1500-1553).

Tonight’s program contains music by Heinrich Isaac and one of his

Italian contemporaries, Francesco da Milano (1497-1543). For most of his

career, Milano was closely associated with the papal court in Rome. He was 

a member of Pope Leo x’s personal orchestra and is known to have performed for Pope Clement vn in 1526. During the course of his career, he

fulfilled commissions for and performed in the courts ofthe d’Este, Farnese,

and Medici families. A master ofintabulation (transcription and arrangement for the lute of polyphonic vocal works), he was a leader among the

composers whose style evolved from the loose improvisation that characterized late fifteenth-century lute music to the more refined polyphonic textures ofthe sixteenth century.

Franco-Flemish composer Heinrich Isaac is known to have worked in

his native Low Countries until 1485, when he would have been about thirty

years old. The Italian sun and lively musical culture beckoned, and Isaac 

went offto Florence, where he worked for the Medici family. When the

Medicis were banned from Florence in 1494, Isaac was forced to seek new

patrons, and he found one in Maximilian 1, who employed him from 1497 to

1514, a period during which he often traveled with the emperor’s personal

musical entourage to Augsburg. Isaac returned to Florence when the

Medicis regained power there in 1514, but he continued to enjoy favor and

commissions from patrons in Augsburg, including Cardinal Matthaus Lang,

counselor and secretary to Maximilian 1. Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen

7
(Innsbruck, I must leave you) dates from 1514, and is presumed to have been

written on the occasion of his departure for Florence with mixed feelings

after an agreeable sojourn ofseventeen years in Germany. His best-known

song, it became the melody for compositions by Bach and Brahms in

subsequent centuries.

Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger was a member ofthe generation of composers who were taught by the likes of Heinrich Isaac and Francesco da Milano 

and who carried music forward into the stylistic period now known as baroque.

Kapsberger’s compositions reflect more attention to musical instinct than

learned technique—signature features ofhis toccatas include unusual rhythmic groupings, spontaneous changes of character, and a loose regard for the

rules of counterpoint that were held sacred by most ofhis contemporaries.

One ofthe most important and prolific composers for the lute in the

early eighteenth century, Sylvius Leopold Weiss worked in Breslau, Dresden,

Munich, and Rome. An accomplished virtuoso lutenist in his own right,

Weiss befriended Wilhelm Friedmann Bach, and through this relationship

became acquainted with Johann Sebastian Bach. He enjoyed a reputation as

the world’s best lutenist in his own lifetime, and his works stand out among

those composed for that instrument in the baroque period. Most of his

surviving works are six-movement dance suites, representing a fusion of

French and Italian styles. Weiss’ suites typically begin with an unbarred and

lightly scored prelude—it is assumed that Weiss improvised these movements in performance. His fast movements, like those ofhis mentor and

model Archangelo Corelli (1653-1713), move forward in an exhilarating

manner without indulging in distracting virtuosity.

An Italian contemporary ofWeiss, Giovanni Zamboni (sometimes

identified with the additional surname “Romano” to distinguish him from

the more famous Luigi Zamboni, who was a star bass-baritone in the world

of nineteenth-century Italian opera), was not only a lute virtuoso but also 

accomplished on the theorbo, guitar, mandori, and mandolin, and in

demand as a jeweler to boot. His collection of eleven Lute Sonatas, op. 1, is

his primary contribution to the repertoire. Like Weiss, Zamboni tended to

write his pieces in dance form and group them in sets ofsix to form suites,

which both composers as often as not identified as sonatas. Mak Grgic plays

two selections from Zamboni’s Sonata vii and the “Ceccona” (Chaconne)

from his twelfth sonata.

Program notes by Michael Jacko, music program specialist,

National Gallery ofArt

9
Concerts at the National Gallery ofArt in October 2012

Thomas Mastroianni, pianist

With Alessandra Marc, soprano,

Ricardo Cyncynates, violinist,

and Francis Conlon, pianist

Music by Paganini, Verdi,

and other composers

Second concert in the

Celebration ofItalian Art, Music, and Film

A collaboration between the Italian Cultural Institute in Washington 

and the National Gallery ofArt

October 14, 2012

Sunday, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

I Musici di Roma

Music by Rossini, Rota,

and other composers

Third concert in the

Celebration ofItalian Art, Music, and Film

October 21, 2012

Sunday, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Tanya Vegvary Plescia, pianist

Music by Hewitt, Mozart, Reinagle,

and other composers

Presented in honor of

Masterpieces ofAmerican Furniture

from the Kaufman Collection, 1700-183

October 28, 2012

Sunday, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court