Upcoming Events of the SeventyFourth Season of The William

Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot

Belin Concerts

Aphrodite Mitsopoulou, pianist

Music by Chopin, Liszt, Constantinidis,

and Skalkottas. Cosponsored by the

Embassy of Greece for the European

Month of Culture

May 19, Thursday, 12:30

West Building, West Garden Court

Jenny Scheinman's 

Kannapolis: A Moving Portrait

Original score accompanying

a documentary

May 22, Sunday, 4:30 

East Building Auditorium

Winners of the 2016 Joseph and Goldie

Feder Memorial String Competition

and Misbin Family Memorial Chamber

Music Competition

Presented in cooperation with

Washington Performing Arts

June 5, Sunday, 2:00 and 4:00

West Building, West Garden Court

General Information

Admission to the National Gallery of Art

and all of its programs is free of charge,

except as noted.

The use of cameras or recording equipment

during the performance is not allowed. 

Please be sure that all portable electronic

devices are turned off.

Concerts are made possible in part

through the generosity of donors to the

National Gallery of Art through The Circle. 

Reserved seating is available in recognition

of their support. Please contact the

development office at (202) 842-6450 or

circle@nga.gov for more information.

www.nga.gov

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The department of music produced these

program notes. Copyright © 2016 Board of

Trustees, National Gallery ofArt, Washington

Cover William H. Johnson, Blind Singer (detail),

c. 1940, National Gallery of Art, Washington,

Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Florian Carr

Fund and Gift of the Print Research Foundation

74TH SEASON 

OF CONCERTS

MAY 15, 2016 • NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
PROGRAM

3:30 • West Building, West Garden Court

Ariel Quartet, with Alon Goldstein, piano

Gershon Gerchikov, violin

Alexandra Kazovsky, violin

Jan Gruning, viola

Amit Even-Tov, cello

Alexander Bickard, bass

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

Quartet in B-flat Major, op. 76, no. 4, "Sunrise"

Allegro con spirito

Adagio

Menuetto: Allegro

Finale: Allegro, ma non troppo

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1732-1809)

Piano Concerto in D Minor, K. 466

Allegro

Romance

Rondo, allegro assai

Intermission

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Quintet in F Minor, op. 34, for piano and strings

Allegro non troppo

Andante, un poco adagio

Scherzo: Allegro

Finale: Poco sostenuto

Made possible by the Gottesman Fund in memory of Milton A/I. Gottesman

2 • National Gallery of Art

The Musicians

Characterized by its youth, brilliant playing, and soulful interpretations, the Ariel Quartet

has quickly earned a glowing international reputation. The ensemble formed in Israel

sixteen years ago when its members were young students. Recently awarded the prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award, the quartet serves as the faculty quartet-in-residence

at the University of Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music, where they direct the

chamber music program and perform their own annual series of concerts.

The Ariel Quartet performs widely in Israel, Europe, and North America, including

two record-setting Beethoven cycles last season, performed before any of the quartet

members turned thirty. The Ariel continues to astonish with its performances of complete

works by memory and has remained committed to performing extensively in Israel. In

addition, the Ariel has collaborated with the pianist Orion Weiss, violist Roger Tapping,

cellist Paul Katz, and the American and Jerusalem String Quartets. The quartet toured with

the cellist Alisa Weilerstein during the 2013-2014 season and performs regularly with the

legendary pianist Menahem Pressler.

Formerly the resident ensemble in the New England Conservatory's Professional 

String Quartet Training Program, the Ariel has won a number of international prizes

including the Grand Prize at the 2006 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition and

First Prize at the international competition "Franz Schubert and the Music of Modernity"

in Graz, Austria, in 2003. The American Record Guide described the Ariel Quartet as "a

consummate ensemble gifted with utter musicality and remarkable interpretive power."

The Ariel Quartet has been mentored extensively by Itzhak Perlman, Paul Katz,

Donald Weilerstein, Miriam Fried, Kim Kashkashian, and Martha Strongin Katz, among

others, and spent a formative year in Basel, Switzerland, to study in-depth with Walter

Levin, the founding first violinist of the LaSalle Quartet. The Ariel has received significant

scholarship support for the members' studies in the United States from the America-lsrael

Cultural Foundation, Dov and Rachel Gottesman, and the Legacy Heritage Fund.

Alon Goldstein is one of the most original and sensitive artists of his generation,

admired for his musical intelligence and dynamic personality. Goldstein's artistic vision and

innovative programming have made him a favorite with audiences and critics throughout

the United States, Europe, and Israel. He made his orchestral debut at the age of eighteen

with the Israel Philharmonic under the baton of Zubin Mehta, and returned a few seasons

ago with Maestro Herbert Blomstedt. In recent seasons Goldstein has performed with the 

Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, and other orchestras on tour in Paris,

Russia, Romania, and Bulgaria.

Among many memorable recent experiences were nationwide performances with

the Tokyo Quartet on their final tour appearances and the premiere Lost Souls with the

Kansas City Symphony, written for Alon Goldstein by the noted Israeli composer Avner

Dorman. Goldstein made his Carnegie Hall debut in the Mozart Triple Concerto with Joseph

Kalichstein and Shai Wosner, as well giving the world premiere of a concerto by Mark

74th Season * 3
Kopytman with Avner Biron and the Jerusalem Camerata Orchestra. Goldstein was a

featured panelist at a recent conference of the League of American Orchestras discussing

his Beethoven concerto cycle with the Rockford Symphony, which expanded the traditional

concert experience to a multimedia presentation contextualizing Beethoven's life and work.

Goldstein is the winner of numerous competitions, among them the Arianne Katcz

Piano Competition in Tel Aviv, the Nena Wideman Competition in the United States, and

the Francois Shapira Competition in Israel. He is also the recipient of the 2004 Salon de

Virtuosi Career Grant and the America-lsrael Cultural Foundation Scholarships. Goldstein

graduated from the Peabody Institute of Music, where he studied with Leon Fleisher.

4 * National Gallery of Art

Program Notes

The Esterhazy family reduced Haydn's annual salary in 1790, as part of a reduction in the

princely court's musical forces, but he was graciously freed to perform elsewhere for additional income. In 1791, he accepted an offer to perform and conduct in London, where his

concerts were a great success. English composer Charles Burney reported that Haydn 

"electrified the audience" and excited more attention "than had ever been caused by instrumental music in England." Haydn's London engagements were also extremely lucrative, and

he returned for another extended visit in 1794.

Haydn experienced something new during his London visits —concerts that were

open to the public in large halls. The contrast between this and his traditional Viennese

settings of intimate aristocratic salons was striking. Haydn's creative response can be heard

in the grand opus 74 and opus 76 quartets that followed his first and second London visits.

These pieces feature attention-catching introductions, accentuated dynamic contrasts,

more expressive slow movements, and much virtuoso-part writing.

The Quartet, op. 76, no. 4, opens slowly with a rising theme in the first violin that

earned it the nickname "Sunrise." After a brief extension of this calm mood, the Allegro

con spirito tempo abruptly asserts itself in a cascade of energetic sixteenth notes. The

rest of the movement continues as a dramatic back-and-forth between the mood of the

quiet opening and that of the following sixteenth-note passage.

The Adagio is one of Haydn's most expressive slow movements, a free fantasia on the 

opening five notes. After long, melodic lines slowly unfold, an underlying pulse is added that

heightens the movement's poignant sense of melancholy. Haydn progressively reshapes the 

opening motif in a variety of ways as melodic passages swell up and tumble softly down.

A single pizzicato note in the cello alerts the audience to a searching canonic passage. The

Adagio is followed somewhat comically by the Menuetto's heavy peasant-dance rhythm.

The last note of the Menuetto overlaps with the first note of the trio section, whose sustained 

drones in the viola and cello continue the folk-music effect. The somewhat somber trio falls 

off quietly, but a return of the bouncy Menuetto restores good feeling.

The unusual finale initially proceeds as a straightforward working of the movement's

opening bars. After elaborate harmonization and touches of Haydnesque humor, an emphatic

cadence announces what appears to be the quartet's closing. But surprises lie in wait. A rapid

cadenza-like musical line opens the coda. After it passes among the instruments, the four

voices come together, now marked "even faster." A finale that began as a moderately paced

Allegro ends in a virtuoso display at breakneck speed. Program notes by Robert Strong

74th Season * 5
Mozart's Piano Concerto in D-Minor, K. 466, was introduced to the world at one of the

composer's subscription concerts. The success of the concerto on February 11,1785 (it

had been completed the day before) was considerable, based in no small part on Mozart's

playing of the demanding solo. The entire presentation was made additionally notable as

the ink was still wet on some of the orchestral parts until an hour before the performance.

While the concerto makes its stormy intentions clear from the get-go, it does not 

state its principal theme; rather, there are a few bars of murmurous, agitated, syncopated

swirlings in the violins and violas, with stabbing cellos and basses, until the tension

explodes —for the first of several times in this turbulent music —in a volley for the entire

orchestra. The piano creeps in with a quiet, almost frightened-sounding theme, which the

orchestra attempts repeatedly to banish. The battle is unceasing, and there is no victor.

The tension remains to the end, unresolved (albeit in D minor).

The only thing predictable about the slow movement is that it will provide graceful, 

lyric contrast. But it does so with qualms. At midpoint, Mozart intrudes on the calm, B-flat

song with a cyclonic presto outburst in G minor, jolting listener and performer from their

reverie, with the soloist forced to race up and down the keyboard with a degree of virtuosity

elsewhere in Mozart restricted to the outer movements of a concerto.

In the finale, the piano announces the theme and then gives way to a rich, long 

development in the orchestra with fire and fangs, before the reentry of the piano, with some 

particularly felicitous interchanges with the winds. But menace remains in the air, with no

transition to the major; it just happens. The conflict was not going anywhere, only becoming

more conflicted. Thus, the conclusion of this most D-minor of concertos is in D major.

Program notes by Herbert Glass

One evening Brahms was asked how he had spent the day. "I was working on my symphony," he replied. "In the morning I added an eighth note. In the afternoon I took it out."

Spurious as this anecdote may be, it does furnish some insight into the slow, careful way 

Brahms fashioned his music and the difficulty he had in bringing certain works up to his

incredibly high standards. The piano quintet is a particularly good illustration of a composition that underwent several major revisions before publication.

The original version of the quintet, which Brahms composed in 1862, was for two

violins, viola, and two cellos,. The following year, Brahms entirely transformed the piece

into a sonata for two pianos, which he performed with Karl Tausig in Vienna early in 1864.

(Although Brahms burned the original cello quintet version, he preserved the two-piano

realization, which is published as opus 34b.) Critics gave it a generally poor reception

saying it lacked the necessary warmth and beauty that only string instruments could 

provide. During the summer of 1864, Brahms reworked the same musical material, this time

shaping it into its final piano quintet form. At long last satisfied, the composer allowed it

to be published in 1865, and it is now considered his most epic piece of chamber music.

The massive and complex first movement is replete with a superabundance of 

melodic strains and rhythms. Yet, despite this rich diversity, Brahms achieves a musical 

synthesis through the use of various unifying techniques that are skillfully woven into the 

music. For example, the movement opens with piano, first violin, and cello singing the noble,

6 * National Gallery of Art

sonorous first theme. After a pause, the piano begins a passage of running notes that seems

unrelated to the opening statement. Careful listening, though, reveals that the passage is

nothing more than a free, speeded-up transposition of the melody we have just heard.

The slow movement is serene, tender, and simple, especially in comparison with the 

majestic sweep of what has come before. With three basic musical ideas, the Scherzo has

great rhythmic verve and a plenitude of melodic material. After expanding and developing

these themes, the music builds powerfully to a sudden cut-off, which is followed by the

contrasting cantabile melody of the trio.

The Finale opens with a slow introduction that casts a mood of dark foreboding.

Soon the shadows disperse as the cello saunters forth with a fast, jolly tune. After a dramatic

outburst, a second melody appears, slightly faster in tempo, but drooping with feigned 

sorrow. A vigorous, syncopated theme brings the exposition to an end. The freely realized

development and recapitulation lead to the coda, a summing up of the entire movement in

an unrestrained whirlwind of orchestral sonority. Program notes by Melvin Berger