11 The Aulos Ensemble

Presented in honor of the

exhibition Jean-Antoine

Houdon (1741-1828):

Sculptor ofthe

Enlightenment

18 Livia Sohn, violinist

25 Klaus Hellwig, pianist

June

1 National Gallery

Orchestra

George Manos, conductor

8 Ilya Gringolts, violinist

Rameau: Suites from Lesfetes

cl'Hebe and Les Indes galantes

Works by Jacques Duphly and

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

J. S. Bach: Sonata, BWV 1016

Grieg: Sonata No. 3

Works by Jonathan Berger and

Jeno Hubay

Beethoven: Sonata, Op. 14/2

Schumann: Davidsbiindlertanze,

Op. 6

Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 3

Ravel: Le tombeau de Couperin

Ravel: Bolero

Partitas and sonatas for

unaccompanied violin by J. S. Bach

15 National Gallery Chamber Griffes: Indian Sketches

Players String Quartet Janacek: Quartet No. 1

Beethoven: Quartet, Op. 130

Concerts continue until 29 June.

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.

For the convenience of concert goers

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

The Sixty-first Season of

THE WILLIAM NELSON CROMWELL and

L. LAMMOT BELIN CONCERTS

National Gallery of Art

2454th Concert

LOUIS LORTIE, pianist

Presented in honor of the exhibition

Frederic Remington: The Color ofNight

Sunday Evening, 6 April 2003

Seven O’clock

West Building, West Garden Court

Admission free
Program

Robert Schumann Friihlingsnacht

(1810-1856) from “Liederkreis,” Op. 39, S. 568

Arranged for piano solo by Franz Liszt (1872)

Richard Wagner

(1813-1883)

O du mein holder Abendstern

from “Tannhauser”

Arranged for piano solo by Franz Liszt

Schumann Drei Phantasiestucke

Op. Ill (1851)

Molto vivace et appassionatamente 

Piu tosto lento; un poco piu mosso

Con forza, assai marcato

Franz Liszt Transcendental Etude No. 5, S. 139

(1811-1886) “Feux-follets” (1851)

Transcendental Etude No. 11, S. 139

“Harmonies du soir” (1851)

Hungarian Rhapsody No. 9, S. 244

“Carnaval de Pest” (1848)

Intermission

Elliot Carter

(b. 1908)

Night Fantasies

(1980)

Maurice Ravel

(1875-1937)

Ondine

Le gibet

Scarbo

Gaspard de la nuit

(1908)

The Musician

In a 1997 review in The Daily Telegraph (London), music critic Philip

Hensher hailed Louis Lortie as “one of perhaps a dozen pianists who it

is worth dropping everything to go and hear. For sheer intelligence,

subtlety, and technical command he has few peers. For the unique

demands of bravura, delicate coloring, and seriousness which the music

of Chopin places on the pianist, I think he now has none....It is

impossible to come up with anything but praise for musicianship so

prodigious and intelligence so unbounded.” Such a panegyric response to

this Canadian pianist is by no means rare. He has been praised for the

fresh perspective and individuality he brings to a deliberately broad

spectrum of the keyboard literature. Lortie studied with Yvonne Hubert,

a pupil of the great French pianist, Alfred Cortot (1877-1962); with the

Beethoven specialist Dieter Weber; and subsequently with Leon Fleisher.

In addition, he was deeply influenced by the distinguished violinist and

chamber musician Josef Gingold (1909-1995).

Born in 1959 in Montreal, Louis Lortie gave his first public

performance at the age of thirteen with the Montreal Symphony. Three

years later, he made his debut with the Toronto Symphony and toured the

People’s Republic of China and Japan as soloist with that orchestra. In

1984 he won first prize at the Busoni Competition and was a prizewinner

at the Leeds Competition in England. Lortie has made more than twentyfive recordings on the Chandos label. Among them is a complete set of

the Chopin Etudes, Op. 10 and Op. 25, that has been cited in the BBC

Magazine's special piano issue as one of the “fifty best recordings by

superlative pianists.” His recording of Beethoven’s Eroica Variations
won the Edison Award, and his disc of Schumann’s Bunte Blatter and

other works by Schumann and Brahms was named one of the best CDs of

the year by BBC Music Magazine. In addition to having recorded Ravel’s

complete works for piano, Lortie’s releases include the complete works

for piano and orchestra of Liszt. Following the success in 1998 of his

Chopin Preludes CD, he will soon release a CD of Chopin Ballades and

Impromptus. Louis Lortie appears at the National Gallery by arrangement 

with Cramer/Marder Artists of Lafayette, California.

Program Notes

Fascination with night and darkness is found in the literature of the

Western world from the time of ancient Greece, but it was in the

nineteenth century that the night in all its aspects became a popular 

subject for both visual artists and composers. The first composer to make

use of the term nocturne and establish it as a genre was John Field, who

bestowed the title on eighteen of his piano pieces. His approach to piano

texture captured the attention of Chopin, whose nocturnes, with their

wide range of moods, placed the genre on a higher plane. The most

famous painter to make frequent use of the term as a title was James

Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), for whom the use of a musical

term suited his commitment to art as pure abstract form. Frederic

Remington’s nocturnes, like Whistler’s, exploit the tension between the

almost palpable beauty of darkness and moonlight, but they also evoke

the imminence of danger, death, and psychological disturbance. Unlike

Whistler, Remington acknowledged the presence of narrative suspense in

his night pieces, and in this he had much in common with Chopin.

Franz Liszt, a master of the art of transcribing music from one

medium to another, was nowhere more successful in this endeavor than

in his astonishing transcriptions of songs and opera arias. These 

gratifying pianistic gems demonstrate Liszt's uncanny ability to retain

every subtlety inherent in the original vocal score. Two examples begin

this program of music of the night: Schumann’s Fruhlingsnacht (Spring

Night) from Liederkreis, Op. 39 (S. 568) and Wagner’s O du mein holder

Abendstern (O Gracious Evening Star) from Tannhduser (S. 444).

Schumann wrote his Drei Phantasiestiicke (Three Fantasy

Pieces), Op. Ill, during his stay in Diisseldorf, a prolific period during

which he also composed his Symphony No. 3, Op. 97 (Rhenish),

Mdrchenbilder, Op. 113, for viola and piano, and the Cello Concerto,

Op. 112. The Fantasy Pieces contain, as the late renowned pianist

Claudio Arrau (1903-1991) stated, “something of the earlier intensity

about [them],” suggesting the depth and ardency found in three of

Schumann’s earlier piano works, the Jugend-Album, Op. 68, Four

Marches, Op. 76, and Waldszenen, Op. 82. Further, Arrau maintains that

Schumann had perhaps experienced a feeling of deja vu concerning

earlier works of the same genre, [Acht] Phantasiestiicke, Op. 12, written

in 1837. Composed some fourteen years later, Op. Ill has within its

three independent movements an outward appearance of a free fantasy in

an ABA format. To cite Arrau, “Indeed, the contrast between the unrest

of the first [movement], the Schubertian calm of the second, and the

vigor of the third makes Op. 111a most satisfying whole.”

Liszt’s Etudes d'execution transcendante (Transcendental

Studies) reached its final version in 1852 in the form of a set of twelve

studies. In 1827, at the age of sixteen, Liszt had projected a prototype

consisting of twenty-four etudes. In 1836 he created a second version and

dedicated it to Carl Czerny. To quote the legendary French pianist of

Hungarian birth, Gyorgy Cziffra (1921-1994), “[This collection is] the

summation of the artist’s meditations on his art, with particular attention

to matters of technique, an initiation to the very nature of that art, and

perhaps even a philosophy.” The two studies on tonight’s recital are

among the more delectable and less aggressive of the set. Feux-follets is

light and airy, with the overtones of elves at play in a Mendelssohnian

musical fairy tale. Harmonies du soir, on the other hand, elicits the aural

felicity of a bejeweled nocturne in the form of a grand, luxurious etude,

the tone colors and sonorities of which are a harbinger of music of

Debussy and Richard Strauss.

From the beginning of his “virtuoso period” in 1839 to the end of

his life, the gypsy music of his native Hungary held a great deal of

fascination for Liszt. He had left the land of his birth in childhood,

returning some twenty years later (1840) to great acclaim. The ninth
Hungarian Rhapsody (Carnaval de Pest) is among the nineteen he wrote

for solo piano, in which he aspired to immortalize the music of the

Hungarian gypsies. As its subtitle implies, the rhapsody is a vociferous

essay on conviviality.

In Elliott Carter’s own words: “Night Fantasies is a piano piece

of continuously changing moods, suggesting the fleeting thoughts and

feelings that pass through the mind during a period of wakefulness at

night. The quiet, nocturnal evocation with which it begins and [which]

returns occasionally, is suddenly broken by a flighty series of short

phrases that emerge and disappear. Many others of contrasting character

follow this episode, sometimes breaking] in abruptly and at other times

developing] smoothly out of what has gone before. The work culminates

in a loud, obsessive, periodic repetition of an emphatic chord that, as it

dies away, brings the work to its conclusion.

In this score, I wanted to capture the fanciful, changeable quality

of our inner life at a time when it is not dominated by strong directive

intentions or desires. [I wanted] to capture the poetic moodiness that, in

an earlier romantic context, I enjoy in [the] works of Robert Schumann,

[such as his] Kreisleriana, Op. 16, Carnaval, Op. 9, and Davidsbiindlertdnze, Op. 6.”

Gaspard de la nuit was written in 1908 and derived its title from

the eponymous collection by Aloysius Louis Bertrand (1807-1841), an 

exponent of chimerical poetry who was held in awe by Baudelaire and

Mallarme. Bertrand attributed the poems in the collection to the devil, alias

Gaspard. Ravel’s desire was to “write a piano piece that is even harder to

play than Mily Balakirev’s oriental fantasy, Islamey.” Each of the three

pieces teems with Herculean requirements: double notes that are

effervescent and unrelenting (Ondine); repeated bell-like notes, requiring

extraordinary control (Le gibet); and forward surging runs, creating an 

inexorable charge (Scarbo). Ravel creates in music the satanic elements

inherent in all three poems: Ondine, a water nymph with her contemptuous

laughter; Le gibet, a bell tolling at sunset as a corpse hangs from the

gallows (Ravel’s paraphrase); and Scarbo, a goblin appearing as a

frightening apparition. One French writer observed: “[The pieces] are not

atmospheric portraits in the style of Liszt or Schumann, but psychological

case studies, observed and recorded with the incorruptibility of an analyst.”

Program notes by Elmer Booze

Concerts at the National Gallery of Art

Under the direction of George Manos

Concerts in April, May, and June 2003

April

13 Valerie Tryon, pianist

Presented in honor of

the exhibition Frederic

Remington: The Color

ofNight

20 No concert

27 Zuill Bailey, cellist

j. y. song, pianist

May

4

Chopin: Two Nocturnes

Liszt: Harmonies du soir

Granados: The Lover and the

Nightingale

Poulenc: Three Nocturnes

Mendelssohn: Variations

concertantes

Beethoven: Cello Sonata No. 4

Crumb: Sonata for Solo Cello

Prokofiev: Sonata, Op. 119

Barriere: Sonata in G Major

Mozart: O Isis and Osiris

Haydn: Duet in G Major

Boccherini: Adagio and Allegro

Julius Berger and

Hyun-Jung Berger, cellists

Presented in honor of the

exhibition Jean-Antoine

Houdon (1741-1828:

Sculptor of the

Enlightenment