Upcoming Events of the SeventyFifth Season of The William

Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot

Belin Concerts

West Garden Trio

Piano Trios by Kenji Bunch, Charles Ives,

and Paul Schoenfield

May 31,12:10

West Building, East Garden Court

Eclipse Chamber Orchestra

Music by Piazzolla and Vivaldi

June 4, 4:00

East Building Auditorium

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 © 2017 Board of

Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Cover Raoul Dufy, Blue Train (detail), 1920- 

1935, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 

The John U. and Evelyn S. Nef Collection

MAY 21, 2017 • NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
PROGRAM

4:00 • East Building Auditorium

Poulenc Trio

Liang Wang, oboe 

Bryan Young, bassoon

Irina Kaplan Lande, piano

Jean Francaix (1912-1997)

Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano

Adagio; Allegro molto

Andante

Finale

Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1931)

Sonata for Oboe and Piano, op. 166

Andantino

Ad libitum; Allegretto; Ad libitum

Molto allegro

Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868)

Arr. Charles Triebert and Eugene Jancourt

Fantaisie Concertante on themes from Semiramide

Intermission

Viet Cuong (b. 1990)

Trains of Thought

Animation by Elizabeth and Alden Phelps

Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998)

Arr. Mikhail Krutik

Suite in the Old Style

Pastorale

Ballet

Minuet

Fugue

Pantomime

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)

Arr. Anatoly Trofimov

"Romance," op. 97a, from The Gadfly

“A Spin through Moscow," from Moscow-Cheryomushki, op. 105

2 • National Gallery of Art

The Musicians

The Poulenc Trio is the most active touring piano-wind chamber music ensemble in the

world. Since its founding in 2003, the trio has performed throughout the United States and

at music festivals around the world, including the Ravello Festival in Italy, the San Miguel

de Allende Festival in Mexico, and the White Nights Festival in Russia, where the group

toured and premiered two new works with violinist Hilary Hahn.

In a recent review, the New York Times praised the trio for its "elegant rendition"

of Piazzolla's tangos. The Washington Post said the trio "does its namesake proud" in

"an intriguing and beautifully played program" with "convincing elegance, near effortless

lightness and grace." A recent performance in Florida — for which the Palm Beach Post

praised the group's "polished loveliness" and the Palm Beach Daily News said the "potent

combination" of oboe, bassoon, and piano had "captured the magic of chamber music"—

was rebroadcast on American Public Media's nationally syndicated radio program Performance Today. The trio has garnered positive attention in recent full-length profiles by

Chamber Music magazine and the Double Reed Journal and has been called "virtuosos of

classical and contemporary chamber music" in a profile on Russian television.

The Poulenc Trio has a strong commitment to commissioning, performing, and

recording new works from living composers. Since its founding, the trio has greatly

expanded the repertoire available for the oboe, bassoon, and piano, with no fewer than

twenty-two new works written for and premiered by the group, including three triple

concertos for the trio and full orchestra.

The Poulenc Trio launched a pioneering concert series called Music at the Museum,

in which musical performances are paired with museum exhibitions, with special appearances from guest artists and curators. As part of the series, the trio has collaborated with

the National Gallery in Washington, DC, the Walters Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum

of Art, and the Hermitage State Museum in Russia.

The trio is deeply engaged in musical and educational outreach programs, including

Pizza and Poulenc, an informal performance and residency series for younger audiences. 

The trio regularly conducts master classes, most recently at the University of Ohio, San

Francisco State University, Florida State University, and the University of Colima in Mexico.

75th Season • 3
Program Notes

Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano

Jean Francaix was a modern French composer very much in the neoclassical tradition of 

Poulenc: he eschewed the trends of atonality and the rejection of traditional form, choosing

wit, color, and a supple lightness in the service of producing musical "pleasure." Prolific 

throughout his life, Francaix was a piano virtuoso, an active performer, a skilled orchestrator,

and a composer in myriad forms and ensembles. Like great French composers, Francaix had

a skillful penchant for the wind instruments.

The Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano was commissioned by the International

Double Reed Society for its 24th Festival in 1994. The Trio is astonishing for its modernity

and accessibility. In the tradition of neoclassicism, the music is simultaneously familiar from

the past, yet new and different, undeniably of the present. But where the original neoclassicists looked to the eighteenth century and earlier for their inspiration, Francaix, in this work,

seems to look back within his own lifespan. In a new loop of neoclassical spirit, the music 

evokes the popular sounds of a young modernism in the early twentieth century: syncopated 

urban rhythms, musical theater, the exuberance and occasional plaintive nostalgia of

contemporary man. The strengths of the composition are its exquisite detail and complexity,

the virtuosic demands placed on the performer, and the expert use of the idiomatic

qualities of the instruments. Francaix's thoughts are as refreshing as his music:

It's difficult for a composer to talk about his own works. If he praises

them, he is accused of boasting; if he disparages them, he is considered

guilty of false modesty. If he dissects them into theme A and theme B,

musicologists will applaud, but musicians will find him boring. If the work 

is of any value, it will need no explanation; if it is of no value, no esoteric

commentary will render it any better.... All I ask my listeners is to open

their ears and be brave enough to decide whether they like my music or

not. I don’t want any intermediary between me and my listeners trying to 

sway their judgment one way or the other. They should remember they

are free human beings, not obedient automata. I want them to crush

snobbery, fashion, and envy with the power of common sense and to

enjoy my music if it gives them pleasure; which of course I hope it does.

Adapted from a text by Kai Christensen

Fantaisie Concertante on themes from Semiramide

This Concert-Fantasy, based on tunes from Rossini's last Italian opera, Semiramide, is from a

collection of delightful opera-inspired arrangements dating from nineteenth-century Paris

and the salon music of that time. It contains works by the opera composers Rossini and

Donizetti, favorites of the Parisian audiences, in arrangements by the oboe and bassoon

virtuosi (and Conservatoire professors) of the day: Charles Triebert, Henri Brod, and Eugene

Jancourt. These works were not only "tuneful" but enabled the performers to show off their

ample virtuosity.

4 • National Gallery of Art

Semiramide is based on Voltaire's tragedy Semiramis, which in turn was based on

the legend of Queen Semiramis of Babylon. It has been called "the last opera of the great

baroque tradition: the most beautiful, the most imaginative, possibly the most complete;

but also, irremediably, the last." Program notes provided by the Poulenc Trio

Trains of Thought

Composer's Note on Trains of Thought

My goal in writing Trains of Thought was to aurally bring life to the mind's stream of consciousness. Ideas are usually interconnected in the mind through a cohesive sequence of 

events, but their journeys and destinations can be unpredictable. In this way, the piece

deals with the listener's expectations and attempts to convincingly manipulate them. As

the mind deviates from and returns to an original idea, the idea's return is often informed by

its travels. References to the exciting kinetic energy of an actual locomotive can be heard.

Elizabeth Phelps on Trains of Thought's Animation

When Irina approached me about animating Trains of Thought, Alden and I had been

experimenting on and off in the studio with stop-action animation for several years and the

idea of combining stop-motion visuals with live chamber music was intriguing. I had first

heard Trains of Thought in concert a year earlier and had been delighted and entranced by its 

driving energy and sense of locomotion. I loved how Viet's ideas about stream of consciousness played out in the music, his themes and motifs weaving like our thoughts toward a

certain end, repeatedly deviating from and returning to, informing and enriching his original

musical idea.

I came to animation via live puppetry, theater, and film production. In those worlds,

music most often acts as an underscore, part of the scaffolding for a visual or textual

narrative. In this project, the music itself needed to be center stage with the animation

acting as a complement, illuminating the musical ideas rather than overwhelming them

with a strong linear story. The music needed to drive the visuals instead of the other way 

around. This was new territory for me. I began by deconstructing the piece phrase by

phrase, trying to understand how it worked and taking meticulous notes about tempo and

timing, living closely with it as music for two months and thinking about it conceptually

before allowing myself to approach it visually.

Many of the central visual choices in the piece came about because I was building

and shooting it by myself in a small studio within a time frame that was very short for the 

size of the project. The choice to photograph flat paper figures from above on interchangeable sections of landscape imposed helpful limits on construction and production, as well

as saving space and avoiding a lot of specialized rigging. Manipulating scale and proportion

opened up interesting possibilities while limiting the need to build most things in multiple

sizes. Manually composing as much of the action as possible in real space and time spared

us hours of post-production computer work and intentionally made the manipulation

process visible in the final piece.

The Poulenc Trio's rendering of Trains of Thought suggests the smart elegance of

mid-century New York City to me with a whiff of memory and dream. I drew heavily from

old New Yorker artists, digging deeply into cover illustrations of city brownstones as well

75th Season • 5
as Helen Hokinson's funny society ladies, and the wonderful line drawings and paper-bag

masks of Saul Steinberg. Viet's musical observations about stream of consciousness took

me to the surrealists and to M. C. Escher's drawings of buildings and cities which weave

endlessly in and out of themselves. Both the landscape and the figures were cut from

dozens of prepared papers and layered with found materials to add texture and dimension.

The construction and the manipulation of these objects was painstaking, much of it done

with tweezers over the course of six months.

The rehearsal process was a different kind of challenge. I conceived the visual

sequences with fluid transitions so the trio doesn't have to hit hard "marks," since they're

unable to watch the video while they play; the difficult task of keeping the music in sync

with the visuals remains. Working through that together was a lively and exacting process.

There were all sorts of wonderful surprises as it began to come together and we could 

see the music and the images folding into each other, driving and reinforcing each other

in unexpected and playful ways, tiny changes in timing and synchronicity eliciting very 

different effects. My hope is that the animation will reflect the brightness and energy of

the music, adding a layer of possibility to the audience's experience of it and maybe even

making them smile.

Suite in the Old Style

Following the death of Dimitri Shostakovich in 1975, Alfred Schnittke emerged as Russia's

most prominent composer. Under the Soviet regime, Schnittke's excursions into modernism

sometimes met with official disapproval, and he was for a while banned from traveling

outside Russia. During the less repressive period of the 1980s, however, he fared better. At

that time, too, Russian performers like Gidon Kremer, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Gennady 

Rozhdestvensky began introducing his music to audiences in the West and in Japan.

Schnittke soon became one of the world's best-known living composers.

In a cruel counter to this rising recognition, Schnittke's health steadily worsened.

In 1985, he suffered a near-fatal stroke. Thereafter he was stricken by a succession of 

further strokes up to the one that killed him in 1998. Throughout these last years, he

continued to compose to the extent that he was able. In 1997, by then partially paralyzed, 

he laboriously completed his Ninth Symphony by scrawling the notes with his left hand.

He lived just long enough to hear a tape of the symphony's first performance from June

1998. He was at that time living in Germany, having moved there in 1991 to teach at the 

Hamburg Institute for Music.

During the later 1950s, while he was still studying at the Moscow Conservatory,

Schnittke became intrigued by the 12-tone music of Schoenberg and Webern. By the mid1960s, however, he abandoned serialism in favor of a technique that he labeled "polystylism."

"The goal of my life," he once explained, "is to unify serious music and light music, even if

I break my neck doing so." He fashioned for himself a musical language that freely mixed

musical styles and that boldly moved between the traditional and the avant-garde, the classic

and the modern.

6 • National Gallery of Art

While far removed from the most radical of his compositions, Suite in the Old Style

carries traces of Schnittke's arresting eclecticism. Written in 1972 as a duo for violin and

piano, the Suite draws upon music that Schnittke produced as soundtracks for films.

Schnittke, like other Soviet composers, was often called upon to compose movie scores.

In Schnittke's case, these assignments often afforded him a freedom to employ techniques

that would have been taboo for use in his concert works. As in Grieg's Suite in the Old Style,

more commonly known as the Hoberg Suite, the term old-style in Schnittke's title refers to

the baroque. Schnittke based his suite on music he had written for the movies. It consists

of five movements: a gentle Pastoral, a bouncy Ballet, an unusually slow Minuet, a vigorous

Fugue, and, in a distinct sampling of the composer's polystylistic technique, an easy-going, 

melodious Pantomime that slides momentarily into an eerily dissonant section that is far 

distant from any baroque practice. Program notes provided by the Poulenc Trio

"Romance," op. 97a, from The Gadfly

"A Spin through Moscow," from Moscow-Cheryomushki, op. 105

In a musical career spanning half a century, Shostakovich engrossed himself with a staggeringly diverse range of genres and styles. Beyond the fifteen symphonies and fifteen string

quartets, the lesser-known works of Shostakovich offer equal intrigue and interest. With the

reappraisal of Shostakovich in recent times, his light music is beginning to enjoy unprecedented popularity in concert halls and record catalogues.

The Gadfly (1955) is probably Shostakovich's best-known film score. It is an orchestral

suite of incidental music from the film, which was based on a novel of the same name by

Ethel Lilian Voynich. Set in 1840s Italy under the dominance of Austria, a time of tumultuous

revolt and uprisings, the story centers on the illegitimate son of a cardinal who joins the fight

to unite Italy. When caught, he faces the firing squad as a willing martyr. It is a story of faith,

disillusionment, revolution, romance, and heroism.

The Gadfly was exceptionally popular in the Soviet Union, exerting a large cultural

influence. It was compulsory reading in the Soviet Union and the top best seller; indeed by

the time of Voynich's death, The Gadfly is estimated to have sold 2,500,000 copies in the

Soviet Union alone. Shostakovich composed the score for the film of the same name. Its

most famous section, "Romance," was used in the BBC/PBS TV series, Reilly, Ace of Spies.

Moscow-Cheryomushki (1958) is a three-act comic operetta in a bewildering variation

of styles, from the romantic idiom to the most vulgar popular songs. The satirical plot deals

with one of the most pressing concerns of urban Russians of the day: the chronic housing

shortage and the difficulties of securing livable conditions. "Cheryomushki" translates

as "bird-cherry trees," the name of a real housing estate in southwest Moscow. "A Spin

through Moscow" is the first of the four dance-like movements of the orchestral suite

from the operetta. Program notes provided by the Poulenc Trio

75th Season • 7