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

COVER: Andre Derain, Woman in an Armchair, 1920/1925,

National Gallery ofArt, Washington, Chester Dale Collection

The Sixty-eighth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery ofArt

2,767th Concert

Karin Paludan, soprano

Danielle DeSwert Hahn, pianist

June 2, 2010

Wednesday, 12:10 pm

West Building Lecture Hall

Admissionfree
Program

Music by George Gershwin (1898-1937)

Rialto Ripples Rag

(George Gershwin and Will Donaldson) I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise

From George White’s Scandals of1922

Somebody Loves Me

From George White’s Scandals of1924

Love Walked In

From The Goldwyn Follies

They All Laughed

They Can’t Take that Away From Me

From Shall We Dance

Someone To Watch Over Me

Arranged by Joseph Turin

So AmI

From Piano Rolls Recorded by Gershwin

Transcribed by George Litterist

Kurt Weill (1900-1950)

My Ship

From Lady in the Dark

Ballad ofDependency

From Three Penny Opera

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) A Little Bit in Love

From Wondeful Town

Gershwin

Blah-Blah-Blah

From Delishious

Summertime

From Porgy and Bess

Arranged by Jeffrey Moidel

By Strauss
The Musicians

KARIN PALUDAN

Soprano Karin Paludan enjoys a varied career in opera, operetta, and musical theater as well as on the concert stage and in the teaching studio. She 

has been a featured performer with the Utah Festival Opera Company, 

singing the roles of Musetta in La Boheme, and Rosalinda in Die Fledermaus.

Other roles include Rosellen in Seymour Barab’s Phillip Marshall, a performance that brought high praise from the composer; Kate Pinkerton in

Madama Butterfly, which she performed on tour with New York City Opera; 

and the role of Duck #1 in Henry Mollicone and Sheldon Harnick’s Coyote

Tales, which she created at the Lyric Opera of Kansas City. Recent performances include Rosalinda in Die Fledermaus with Western Plains Opera;

performances of Mozart’s Coronation Mass and Exsultate,jubilate; and

a recital, “On the Wings of Shakespeare,” at the Shakespeare Theater

Company’s Harman Center for the Arts in Washington, DC.

An honors graduate with a double major in voice and theater from the

University of Kansas, Paludan has received rave reviews for her portrayals 

of Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Eliza in George Bernard Shaw’s

Pygmalion, and Josephine in Gilbert and Sullivan’s h.m.s. Pinafore. Singing

with “sultry authority” according to the Kansas City Star, she performed as

a guest artist in the Heartland Men’s Chorus’ salute to Gershwin. She tours

throughout the United States with “For Art for Love,” a recital she conceived 

to make classical music more accessible to audiences. Paludan also tours

Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, DC, for the Washington Performing Arts 

Society’s concerts in schools and residency programs. Upcoming engagements include recitals at the Atlas Performing Arts Center and the Harman

Shakespeare Theater, and a duet cabaret recital with her singer-songwriter

sister, Kirsten Paludan, entitled “It’s All Relative.” A pupil of Inci Bashar,

Paludan has won both district and regional awards in the Metropolitan Opera

National Council competition.

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DANIELLE DESWERT HAHN

Brussels-born pianist Danielle DeSwert Hahn is a freelance collaborative

pianist and coach and the music program specialist at the National Gallery 

of Art. She has worked as a pianist and coach with the Ash Lawn Highland

Opera Festival, Chautauqua Opera, Indianapolis Opera, Kentucky Opera, the

New Orleans Opera Association, Portland (Oregon) Opera, the San Francisco

Opera Center, Sarasota Opera, and the Washington National Opera. From

2004-2006 she was the principal repetiteur with the Baltimore Opera

Company and Washington Concert Opera.

She performs regularly in chamber music and voice recitals, including

performances at the Arts Club ofWashington, the Jewish Community Center

of Greater Washington, the Kennedy Center, the Mexican Institute ofCulture,

the National Gallery, the Russian Embassy, and the White House. She is

principal pianist with the Inscape Chamber Music Project. She holds a master

ofmusic degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she

studied with Martin Katz, and a bachelor ofmusic degree from the University

ofCalifornia, Santa Barbara. She also studied with Warren Jones and Anne

Epperson at the Music Academy ofthe West and was an apprentice coach with

the Washington Opera, working with Placido Domingo.

Program Notes

This concert featuring music by George Gershwin is one ofseveral that are 

planned for presentation during the period when paintings from the collection ofChester Dale (1883-1962) are on special exhibition on the ground

floor ofthe West Building. Dale and his wife, Maud, were active New York

socialites who attended and sometimes hosted the most fashionable parties

held on the Upper West Side. One ofthe few musicians who also frequented

those gatherings was George Gershwin, who by 1925 had achieved sufficient

fame and wealth just from the publication and frequent performance of

his Rhapsody in Blue to afford a townhouse in the same neighborhood and

the social life that went with it. It is known that he and Chester Dale were

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acquainted with each other and that it was Gershwin’s encounter with the

art in Dale’s apartment at the Park Lane Hotel that inspired him to collect

art himself and develop his skills as a painter.

Dale was an astute businessman who made his fortune on Wall Street

in the bond market. He thrived on forging deals and translated much ofthis

energy and talent into his art collecting, a passion that was encouraged by

his wife, who was the daughter of an artist. Dale acquired a magnificent

collection of French and American paintings from the late nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries, which he bequeathed in 1962 to the National

Gallery of Art. Among the masterpieces included are Jean-Baptiste-Camille

Corot’s Forest ofFontainebleau (1834), Auguste Renoir’s A Girl with a Watering Can (1876), Mary Cassatt’s Boating Party (1893/1894), Edouard Manet’s

Old Musician, Pablo Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques (1905), and George 

Bellows’ Blue Morning (1909). Other artists represented include Paul 

Cezanne, Salvador Dali, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse,

Amedeo Modigliani, and Claude Monet.

An incident from one ofthe encounters between Dale and Gershwin is

recorded in notes that Dale left behind, which were edited and reproduced

in an autobiography by John Walker, who was the director ofthe National

Gallery when it received the Dale bequest:

“I bumped into George somewhere I can’t remember now. He

said, ‘Oh, Chester, I understand you got a lot ofswell pictures. I’d

like to see them.’ I said, “It’s OK with me, George, come over any

time it’s convenient for you....’ So George, and I think his brother

and somebody else, I don’t remember, came in for cocktails. Just

where we were in the morning room there happened to be a

Cezanne right near the door called Estaque.... [Editor’s note:

Cezanne’s Houses in Provence: The Riaux Valley near 1’Estaque

belonged at the time to Paul Mellon. Dale may have been speaking 

of a Cezanne painting from his collection that was not among those

bequeathed to the Gallery.] George said, ‘My God, that’s a wonderful

picture!’ I said, ‘What the hell do you know about pictures?’ ‘Well,’

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he said, ‘It’s a Cezanne, isn't it?' I said, ‘Sure, it’s a Cezanne.... Are

you interested in art outside ofyour great art?’ He said, ‘Yes, Chester,

I’m crazy about pictures....’ And he proceeded to tell me some

things about Cezanne that even I didn’t know.

I said, 'Now look, George, if you feel that way, why don’t you go

to the piano and play me a Cezanne.... ?’ So he went to the piano....

I haven’t got any more idea than the man in the moon what he

played, but emotionally, there was Cezanne to the both of us.”

(John Walker, Self-portrait with Donors: Confessions ofan Art Collector,

1974, Boston, Little, Brown & Co.)

From Impressionism to Modernism: The Chester Dale Collection includes

eighty-four ofthe finest examples from the collection and remains on view

at the Gallery through July 31, 2011.

George Gershwin the songwriter worked in a medium that did not

encourage innovation, but he found a distinctive personal style and created

songs that remained popular even as fashions changed. From his exposure

to jazz musicians and his own work as a jazz pianist, Gershwin developed

an affinity for eight-bar phrases and an aggressive, swinging beat, with

accents occurring on weak and strong beats alike. His personal touches

included more frequent modulations than were normally heard in improvised jazz, occasional extreme modulations to distantly related keys, and

chromatic melodies. Some of Gershwin’s songs required the performer to

take on rhythmic complexities that were unprecedented for classically 

trained singers ofhis time.

“Someone to Watch over Me” is an early example of a collaboration with

Ira Gershwin as lyricist and features the title as a repeated element in the

refrain and the final words ofthe song. It is one ofthe songs in this program that were already written when Gershwin became acquainted with

Chester Dale, and may well have been among the pieces Gershwin played 

at the parties both attended in the late 1920s.

Program notes by Stephen Ackert, head ofthe music department,

National Gallery ofArt

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