For the convenience of concertgoers 

the Garden Cafe remains open until 6:oo pm.

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 of

the West Building after 6:30 pm is not permitted.

Music Department

National Gallery of Art

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue nw

Washington, DC

Mailing address

2000B South Club Drive

Landover, md 20785

www.nga.gov

The Sixty-eighth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery of Art

2,754th Concert

Jens Elvekjaer, pianist

December 6, 2009

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Admissionfree
Program

Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

Sonata in E-Jlat Major, Hob. xvi:49 (1789-1790)

Allegro

Adagio e cantabile

Finale. Tempo di minuetto

Anton Webern (1883-1945)

Variationsfor Piano, op. 27 (1936)

Sehr massig

Sehr schnell

Ruhig fliessend

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

From Miroirs (1904-1905)

Oiseaux tristes

Une Barque sur l ocean

INTERMISSION

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

Carnaval, op. 9 (1834-1835)

Preambule

Pierrot

Arlequin

Valse noble

Eusebius

Florestan

Coquette

Replique, Sphinxes

Papillons

asch-scha (Lettres dansantes)

Chiarina

Chopin

Estrella

Reconnaissance 

Pantalon et Colombine 

Valse allemande

Intermezzo: Paganini 

Aveu

Promenade

Pause

Marche des Davidsbundler contres les Philistins
The Musician

A native ofCopenhagen, Jens Elvekjaer has won top prizes in some of Europe’s

most prestigious international competitions, including the Brahms Piano

Competition in Austria, the Ferrol Piano Competition in Spain, and the

Scandinavian Piano Competition in Denmark. Denmark’s first Steinway

Artist, Elvekjaer represented his nation at the first Scandinavian Piano Festival

and has performed widely across Asia, Europe, and North America in such

venues as Vienna’s Austrian National Library, Amsterdam’s Beurs van 

Berlage, Tokyo’s Musashino Hall, and Copenhagen’s Tivoli Concert Hall as

well as at the Bergen and Trondheim Festivals in Norway, the Casals Festival

in Puerto Rico, the Korsholm and Kuhmo Festivals in Finland, and the

Umea Kammermusik Festival in Sweden.

A frequent guest soloist with the Danish National Orchestra and professional orchestras in Denmark, Elvekjaer has also performed with the Orchestra of Beurs van Berlage in The Netherlands, the Folkwang and Leipzig

Chamber Orchestras in Germany, and l’Orchestre Syrinx in France. Elvekjaer’s debut CD, Carl Neilsen: Chamber Music, was nominated best solo

album by the 2007 Danish Music Awards, and was hailed in the Danish

newspaper Politiken as “an extraordinary release... performances radiant

with talent.” Elvekjaer’s recitals have been broadcast on Austrian Radio, the

bbc, Danish Radio, Deutschland Radio Berlin, Hessischer Rundfunk, the

Korean Broadcasting Systems, and National Public Radio.

An active chamber musician, Elvekjaer has worked with the Alban Berg

Quartet and is the pianist ofTrio con Brio Copenhagen, which received the

Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson International Trio Award as well as prizes at the

Danish Radio Competition, the Premio Vittorio Gui in Florence, and the Trondheim Chamber Music Competition in Norway. In 2003 the trio won the prestigious Allianz Prize for Best Ensemble at Germany’s Mecklenburg Festival.

Elvekjaer studied in Arhus, Denmark; Cologne, Germany; and at the

Hochschule fur Musilc in Vienna and the Mozarteum in Salzburg. His

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teachers include Leonid Brumberg, Lazar Berman, John Damgaard, KarlHeinz Kammerling, and Ferenc Rados. Jens Elvekjaer appears at the National 

Gallery by arrangement with Lisa Sapinkopf Artists of Emeryville, California.

Program Notes

Though he is most widely known for his prolific output ofstring quartets

and symphonies, Joseph Haydn composed more than fifty sonatas and other

short pieces for keyboard instruments. Haydn was never a keyboard virtuoso, but he had a number ofstudents for whom he composed piano sonatas.

The wide range of ability among his students accounts for the disparate

levels ofsophistication and technical difficulty to be found among the surviving sonatas, most ofwhich were written before 1770. Some ofthese works

have been lost, because Haydn gave the manuscripts to his students without

making copies. By the late 1780s Haydn’s sonatas show clear evidence of

having been written for the piano as opposed to the harpsichord. His exploitation ofthe ability ofthe relatively new piano to produce shaded dynamics

grows with each of his late sonatas.

A few of Haydn’s sonatas, however, were not composed for his students.

The Sonata in E-Jlat Major, Hoboken XVU49, was composed for Marianne

von Genzinger, the wife ofthe Esterhazy family physician. Haydn’s relationship with Genzinger began in 1789, when she sent him a copy of a piano

reduction she had made of a movement from one ofhis symphonies. A

lengthy and intimate correspondence ensued, in which the composer poured

out not only his feelings about music but also his personal frustrations from

a long and unhappy marriage. This sonata shares a certain intimate style with

other works dedicated to Genzinger, but it is quite Beethovenian in some

respects. In general, Haydn’s late keyboard sonatas are among his most

forward-looking works, in which his influence on Beethoven is most visible.

Maurice Ravel’s Miroirs, composed between 1904 and 1905, is a group

offive reflections, written originally for piano, though Ravel later arranged

several ofthem for orchestra. Each movement is dedicated to a different

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person, who is presumably the inspiration for the movement and the person

whose “image” is being reflected. Oiseaux tristes (Sad Birds) is dedicated to

pianist Ricardo Vines, who premiered Miroirs in 1906. Une Barque sur

1ocean (A Boat on the Ocean) is dedicated to painter Paul Sordes. These challenging works push the envelope and represent Ravel s great contributions

to piano technique.

Robert Schumann was a pioneer in the collection ofshort character

pieces, often taken from literature or folk tales, that make up a longer, multimovement work. Camaval, quite possibly Schumann’s most popular work, 

falls into this category. Its subtitle is “Scenes mignonnes sur quatre notes”

(Little Scenes on Four Notes), and it involves a form of cryptography Schumann developed to proclaim his love for his then-fiancee, Ernestine von 

Fricken, who was from the town of Asch. The four letters in the town name

also appear in the German word for the pre-lenten carnival—Fasching—as

well as in Schumann’s name (in reverse order). In the German language,

the letters are the names offour notes: A, E-flat, C, and B-natural. A recurring motif ofthose four notes is incorporated into almost every movement.

The characters that inspired some ofthe movements in Camaval include

Schumann’s friends, the Commedia dell’arte characters Pierrot and Arlequin,

and even Schumann himself, represented by his two alter egos, Eusebius

and Florestan. Elis fiancee is one ofthe characters (Estrelle), as is Clara Wieck,

the teenage daughter of his teacher, who would eventually become his wife

(Chiarina). Schumann honors Chopin and Paganini with their own movements, and in the final movement, all ofthese “good” characters are bound

together as “Davidsbiindler” (members of “the Society of David”). Schumann

created this imaginary group as a musical confederacy against the “Philistines” ofthe day, who included some ofthe music critics who disparaged his

compositions and articles on music.

Program notes by Danielle DeSwert Hahn

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Upcoming Concerts at the National Gallery ofArt

Tine Ting Helseth, trumpeter

Steffen Horn, pianist

Music by Chopin, Falla, Grieg, and other composers

December 13, 2009

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Presented in connection with

Norwegian Christmas at Union Station

National Gallery ofArt Vocal Ensemble

Christmas Concert

Music by Johann Sebastian Bach and Michael Praetorius

December 20, 2009

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court