Concerts at the National Gallery of Art

Under the direction of George Memos

Concerts in March and April 2003

March

30 Ralph Votapek, pianist

April

6 Louis Lortie, pianist

Presented in honor of

the exhibition Frederic

Remington: The Color

ofNight

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

Debussy: Twenty-four Preludes

Schumann: Frithlingsnacht

Phantasiestiicke, Op. Ill

Liszt: Transcendentcd Etudes

Nos. 5 and 6

Hungarian Rhapsody No. 9

Carnaval de Pest

Elliott Carter: Night Fantasies

Ravel: Gaspard de la nuit

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

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

F. LAMMOT BELIN CONCERTS

National Gallery of Art

2452d Concert

LOS ANGELES PIANO QUARTET

MICHI WIANCKO, violin KATHERINE MURDOCK, viola

PETER REJTO, cello XAK BJERKEN, piano

Sunday Evening, 23 March 2003

Seven O’clock

West Building, West Garden Court

Admission free
Ludwig van Beethoven

(1770-1827)

Program

Piano Quartet in E-flat Major

Op. 16 (1796)

Grave; allegro, ma non troppo

Andante cantabile

Rondo: Allegro ma non troppo

Stephen Hartke The King of the Sun

(b. 1952) Tableaux for Violin, Viola, Cello, and Piano

(1988)

1. Personages in the night guided by the tracks of snails

2. Dutch Interior

3. Dancer listening to the organ in a Gothic cathedral

Interlude

4. The flames of the sun make the desert Bower hysterical

5. Personages and birds rejoicing at the arrival of night

Intermission

Johannes Brahms Piano Quartet No. 1 in G Minor

(1833-1897) Op. 25 (1861)

Allegro

Intermezzo: Allegro, ma non troppo

Andante con moto

Rondo alia Zingarese: Presto

The use of cameras or recording equipment during

the performance is not allowed. Please be sure that all

cell phones, pagers, and other electronic devices are turned off.

Musicians

The Los Angeles Piano Quartet made its debut in 1977 at the Music

Center in Los Angeles and soon earned recognition as America’s premier 

piano quartet. This accomplished ensemble has been repeatedly engaged

by major chamber music presenters, and hailed by the public and the

press in Buffalo, Washington, Detroit, Saint Louis, and Chicago, among

many other cities. The quartet has been a popular guest ensemble on

Minnesota Public Radio’s “Saint Paul Sunday” and New York’s “Live

from WNCN” and has been featured at the Bermuda, Tucson, Eugene

(Oregon), and Carmel (California) festivals. Following an impressive

international debut at the Cheltenham Festival in England, the Los

Angeles Piano Quartet was engaged for an appearance at the

Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and an extensive tour of Europe. The

ensemble has been supported in its activity by the National Endowment

for the Arts and Chamber Music America. The quartet’s recordings

include the Dvorak and Schumann piano quartets on the MusicMasters

label and both of Faure’s piano quartets on the Pickwick label. The Los

Angeles Piano Quartet appears at the National Gallery by arrangement 

with Melvin Kaplan, Inc., of Burlington, Vermont.

Winner of the 2002 Concert Artists Guild International

Competition, violinist Michi Wiancko is gaining renown as a musician

of exceptional artistic integrity, graceful performance, and inspired 

programming. She made her Los Angeles Philharmonic debut in 1997,

and her New York solo recital debut took place at Weill Recital Hall at

Carnegie Hall as part of the Concert Artists Guild Winners Series. A

graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she studied under the

tutelage of Donald Weilerstein, she is currently completing her master of

music degree at the Juilliard School of Music, working closely with

Robert Mann.

Violist Katherine Murdock has performed throughout the world

with such groups as Music from Marlboro, the Boston Chamber Music

Society, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Brandenburg Ensemble,

and the New York Philomusica. From 1988 to 1994 she was a member of

the Mendelssohn String Quartet. She is currently on the faculty of the
University of Maryland and SUNY at Stony Brook and spends her

summers on the artist faculty of the Yellow Barn and Kneise Hall

Festivals.

Cellist Peter Rejto has appeared throughout the United States

and abroad in solo recitals and as a concerto soloist. He recently recorded

Gerard Schurmann’s The Gardens of Exile and Miklos Rozsa’s Cello

Concerto on the Silva Classics label. Rejto is the artistic director of the

Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival. Winner of the 1972 Young

Concert Artists International Auditions, he is currently a professor of

cello at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. His instrument is a

Montagnana cello dating from 1721.

Pianist Xak Bjerken has given solo and chamber music recitals

throughout Europe and the United States and appeared with orchestras in

Edinburgh with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and in Rome with the

Spoleto Festival Orchestra. A professor of piano at Cornell University,

Bjerken has held chamber music residencies at the Tanglewood Music

Center and the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. His first solo

recording for CRI, released in 2001, is entitled High Rise. He has also

recorded for Chandos and Koch International, and has made two

recordings with violist Michael Zaretsky for the Artona label.

Program Notes

When first published in 1801, Beethoven’s Quartet in E-flat Major for

Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello, Op. 16, appeared both as a quintet for

piano and winds as well as a quartet for piano and strings. Both versions

had the same opus number and were nearly identical, in spite of the

different number and capabilities of the instruments. It is believed that

the string transcription was intended to make the music more accessible

to a wider public, including the many amateur piano and string groups

active in Vienna at that time. The opening movement {Grave; allegro ma

non troppo) begins with a slow, dignified, and rather long introduction in

the pompous style of the late seventeenth-century French overtures

marked by a dotted eighth- and sixteenth-note rhythm. The subsequent

Allegro strips away any hints of pretentiousness as the three main

themes, all characterized by a simple, relaxed charm, are introduced one

after another. Beethoven underscores the lightness of mood by playfully

inserting a false recapitulation in an erroneous key before reintroducing

the themes in the proper and expected way. In the same frisky manner, he

omits the second part of the first subject near the end of the

recapitulation until after a short written-out piano cadenza is played.

The principal theme of the second movement (Andante cantabile)

is a long-phrased melody that is introduced by the piano and then taken

up by the other instruments. After a contrasting episode in the minor

mode, the melody returns, slightly embellished with additional counter 

melodies. This is followed by another minor key interlude, after which

the main melody again returns, further ornamented and with an even

richer contrapuntal texture. A coda, with scale fragments in contrary

motion between the piano and the other instruments, brings the

movement to a quiet close.

Usually described as three repetitions of a theme separated by

contrasting episodes, the Rondo third movement (Allegro ma non troppo)

can be described as A-B-A-C-A; A is the theme, and B and C are the

contrasts. In this movement, however, C is really a development of the A

section. When the B section is brought back at the end, the organization

comes closer to the sonata form. The writing, typical of Beethoven, is

witty and high-spirited throughout.

Born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1952, and raised in Manhattan,

composer Stephen Hartke was hailed recently by Paul Griffiths in the

New York Times as one of America’s “young lions.” Hartke’s music

reflects the diversity of his musical background, from medieval and

Renaissance polyphony, of which he was once an active performer, to a

very personal synthesis of diverse elements from nonwestern and

western popular music. Since settling in California in the 1980s, Hartke

has enjoyed ever wider circulation of his chamber and orchestral 

compositions. In addition, he has received commissions from such

prestigious sources as the National Symphony Orchestra, the

Koussevitzky Music Foundation, and the Chamber Music Society of

Fincoln Center, among numerous others. He has received awards from

the American Academy in Rome, the American Academy of Arts and
Letters, and the ASCAP Foundation. Much of his music is available on

the CRI, ECM New Series, EMI Classics, and New World Records

labels. Stephen Hartke is a professor of composition at the University of

Southern California, Los Angeles.

Composed in 1988 on commission from the Los Angeles Piano

Quartet with the assistance of a grant from Chamber Music America, The

King of the Sun has been synopsized by Stephen Hartke as follows: “Its

individual movements take their titles from paintings by Joan Miro,

being musical reflections both on the titles themselves, as well as on the

arrangement of pictorial elements within. My aim has been to create a

work that, like Miro’s paintings, is whimsical and serious by turn

through the presentation of seemingly disparate yet related shapes and

gestures. The title [of] the work as a whole is from a different source: a

late fourteenth-century canon dubiously ascribed to the Flemish

composer Johannes Ciconia. The exact solution to the canon has proved

elusive, but one version published in the 1950s, while clearly incorrect,

produces such delightfully spiky collisions between its three voices that I

decided to use it as raw compositional material in the second and fourth

movements, much as Miro used a painting by the Dutch painter Jan

Steen as a basis for his Dutch Interior.”

Composed in 1861 and published in 1863, the Piano Quartet

No. I in G Minor, Op. 25 (along with its companion, Op. 26) was given

its premiere in Hamburg on 16 November 1862, with Brahms' beloved

friend Clara Schumann as the pianist. In his book entitled The Literature

of Chamber Music, Arthur Cohn states that “Beethoven’s mantle is over

Brahms’ shoulder in the proportioned architecture of this work; in its

format, the full romantic Imode of expression] is present...." The first

movement (Allegro) sets the stage for the entire work as a perfect

example of contrapuntal writing. Brahms’ economical use of masterfully 

developed thematic material ushers in a torrent of melodic ideas that are

both novel and full of ardency. In her book, The Life of Johannes

Brahms, Florence May observes: “One seems to hear the bounding

gladness of the artist-spirit which has attained freedom through

submission to law, and revels in its emancipation."

The splendid second movement (Intermezzo), with its gentle

lullaby motion, typifies Brahms’ inimitable style as it acts as a precursor 

to the unfurling of the glorious third movement (Andante con moto). The

grand overall conception is built on an expansive sonority that is derived

from the opening theme and that glows celestially until the very end of

the movement. The last movement (Rondo alia Zingarese: Presto)

appears to be a race to the finish line and is, according to Cohn, “an

exploitation of the Hungarian idiom.” Brahms’ trusted friend and

colleague, the great Austro-Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim (1831-

1907), after examining a copy of the manuscript sent to him, admitted:

“In the last movement, you have outstripped me on my own territory by a

considerable track.” The movement not only generates great excitement

but also demands an enormous amount of energy from each player. It is

that energy that creates the synergism in this work, the aftermath of which

is a state of exaltation for both performers and listeners. As a tribute to

what he considered the quartet’s divine quality, the distinguished Austrianborn American composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) dubbed it

“Brahms’ Fifth Symphony” and orchestrated it for a full symphonic

ensemble. It proved to be one of his most successful orchestral

transcriptions.

Program notes on Beethoven by Melvin Berger, © 1985,

used by permission, and edited and adapted by Elmer Booze

Program notes on The King ofthe Sun by Stephen Hartke,

edited and adapted by Elmer Booze

Program notes on Brahms by Elmer Booze