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74TH SEASON 

OF CONCERTS

FEBRUARY 14, 2016 • NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
Photo by Rich Winslow

2 • National Gallery of Art

3:30 • West Building, West Garden Court

The Cann Duo

Celebrating Love and Commemorating History

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)

Suite for Two Pianos, op. 17

Waltz

Romance

Margaret A. Bonds (1913-1972)

Troubled Water (Wade in the Water)

Jeffrey Mumford (b. 1955)

Four Dances for Boris

Maestoso e sonoro — Impulsivo

Variation: Urgente

Variation: Pensieroso ma grazioso

Variation: Insistente

Michael Leibowitz (b. 1981)

Let My People Go

Intermission

Dolores White

Rock-a-My-Soul

Arthur Benjamin (1893-1960)

Jamaican Rumba

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)

Selections from Symphonic Dances from

West Side Story

Vincent Millie Youmans (1898-1946)

Tea for Two

Arr. J. Louis Merkur

Richard Rodgers (1902-1979)

Falling in Love with Love

Arr. Arthur Whittemore and Jack Lowe

Witold Lutostawski (1919-1994)

Variations on a Theme of Paganini

74th Season • 3
The Musicians

Sisters Kimberly and Michelle Cann are young artists with a deep musical commitment to

performing a wide range of multicultural repertoire throughout the United States and to

bringing the arts to their local communities.

Although Kimberly is six years older than Michelle, they have been studying and

performing together ever since Michelle began lessons. Both made their orchestral debuts

around age thirteen, Kimberly performing Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, and Michelle

playing Schumann's Concerto in A Minor. Kimberly received her master's degree from the

Eastman School of Music, studying with Barry Snyder. In 2006, she accepted the positions

of Visiting Professor of Music and Artist-in-Residence at Northern Caribbean University

in Jamaica. Her students excelled and received national awards for their work. Michelle

received her masters of music from the Cleveland Institute, studying with Paul Schenly and

Daniel Shapiro, and went on to study at the Curtis Institute with Robert McDonald, receiving an Artists Diploma in 2013.

Kimberly is married to fellow Eastman musician, double bassist Aaron Brown, and

the two live in Asheville, North Carolina, with their daughter, Isabella. Kimberly is the founding director of Piano Lab Studios and Keys for Kidz, a program that provides group piano

lessons to underserved children and partners with local universities to mentor young 

teachers. Kimberly also performs as both a soloist and a chamber musician.

Michelle resides in Philadelphia, where she teaches and performs. She also has given

solo and chamber recitals throughout the United States, China, and South Korea. In her

hometown community, she is a leader in creating opportunities for music education. She

served as the choir director for two children's choruses in the El Sistema-inspired program, 

Play On Philly, and is the founder of the new program, Keys to Connect, which strengthens

the bond between parent and child through the shared study of piano.

Kimberly and Michelle began performing professionally as the Cann Duo in 2010,

and since then have toured extensively throughout the United States. Their electrifying

performances are fused with the unmistakable sound of their lifelong hereditary connection.

4 * National Gallery of Art

Program Notes

In Rachmaninoff's Suite for Two Pianos, op. 17, the second movement is a sparkling waltz that

integrates the parts for the two pianos so that they can hardly be distinguished. During the 

middle of the waltz, we get a ripely romantic melody, characteristic of the composer. The

beautifully crafted third movement, Romance, overflows with lyricism and fantasy. Most of 

the movement is introspective, but the impassioned central climax revisits the expressive 

world of the waltz's middle section.

Pianist and composer Margaret Bonds was born in Chicago before the First World War,

and by the time she was twenty, she was the first African American to solo with the Chicago

Symphony Orchestra. At the time, the orchestra did not yet have any full-time female members, and it wasn't until eight years after Bonds's performance, in 1941, that the orchestra

hired a woman player. Bonds went on to become a successful composer, known for infusing

jazz and Negro-folk elements in her neo-romantic compositions. She wrote everything from

orchestral, choral, and chamber music, to spirituals and many piano pieces, virtually all of 

which she committed to memory, never writing them down. Bonds's Troubled Water is based

on the spiritual "Wade in the Water."

The work Four Dances for Boris was written for pianist Lura Johnson to perform as part

of Enter Race, a dance piece commissioned and choreographed by Boris Willis. One of the 

most important elements of these dances, particularly the third, marked Pensieroso ma grazioso,

was to provide a vehicle for Johnson to express her considerable lyrical and rhythmic gifts.

Formally, the work is a set of variations that pay homage to the kind of transparent music

characteristic of a many mid-twentieth-century, neo-classic American works.

Michael Leibowitz says that Let My People Go is a theme and variations based on

three African American spirituals: "Down By the Riverside," "Go Down Moses," and "He's 

Got the Whole World in His Hands." These spirituals have a deeper history than belonging

to the American folk-song tradition. They originated as protest songs, coded-message carriers, and also as music to be sung to elevate an enslaved people and remind them that a

better future awaited. In "Go Down Moses" for instance, the lyric "let my people go" applies 

just as much to the slaves working in the fields in the American South as it does to the 

slaves toiling in ancient Egypt.

All three spirituals are treated to a plethora of compositional variation — harmony, 

rhythm, meter, articulation, and genre are all played with and exploited to create a varied 

and engaging sonic palette. Sometimes the theme comes first, as in the opening "Down By

the Riverside," where a syncopated jazzy accompaniment supports the unaltered melody; 

and sometimes the variation precedes it —atonal polyrhythmic gestures introduce melodic

ideas from "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands." Sometimes the melodies are obfuscated 

by lush, rolling chords, sometimes they devolve into aggressive rhythmic punches, and

occasionally they transform themselves into something entirely new. The climax of the piece

pits all three spirituals against each other, when they are played simultaneously in a four-part

counterpoint with one spiritual in canon and one in rhythmic augmentation, creating a rollicking frenzy of syncopated ferocity.

74th Season * 5
Rock-a-My-Soul is a Negro spiritual, probably first published in 1867 in Slave Songs of

the United States, with no known composer. Delores White's rendition came more than one

hundred years later. White, a trained pianist with degrees from Oberlin College Conservatory

and the Cleveland Institute of Music, was inspired by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

to compose her version of the spiritual in 1996. White stated, "They always end their [dance]

concerts with 'Rock-a-My-Soul.' It is always so spectacular." White's arrangement of the

spiritual does not veer far from the literal quotations of the existing melody. The originality

of the arrangement exists in her treatments of key centers, rhythm, and texture.

Rumba is rooted in the Cuban-Afro music genre, but Jamaican Rumba was written by

the Australian Arthur Benjamin, born in 1893. He made his first public appearance as a pianist

at the age of six. Jamaican Rumba is one of his best-known compositions and is part of a work

for two pianos called Two Jamaican Pieces.

Bernstein's suite opens with the "Prologue," the famous opening confrontation

between the Jets and the Sharks. The haunting strains of "Somewhere," the play's anthem

to the dream of a better life, contrast with the lively Latin dance of the "Marmbo" and

"Cha-cha.” The "Cool Fugue"" segues into the final, deadly fight between the gangs in 

"Rumble," and the suite's finale "I Had a Love" is Maria's lament on the death of Tony.

Vincent Millie Youmans was an American Broadway composer and producer. "Tea for

Two" was featured in the 1925 musical comedy, No, No, Nanette. The song later became a jazz

standard and was recorded by numerous jazz artists, including Art Tatum and Thelonious Monk.

Richard Rodgers was an American composer of more than nine hundred songs and

forty-three Broadway musicals. "Falling In Love with Love" is a show tune from the Rodgers

and Hart musical The Boys from Syracuse, which premiered on Broadway in 1938.

Witold Lutostawski began work as a composer shortly before the outbreak of World

War II, which disrupted his career path. During the German occupation of Poland, cultural

life went underground. Lutostawski and his friend Andrzej Panufnik played piano duets in a

Warsaw cafe, as the Germans had banned public concerts. The duo wrote some two hundred

arrangements, among them Paganini's Caprice No. 24. Lutostawski follows this scheme closely

in his two-piano version, but added a harmonic dimension embracing a chromatically spiced

tonality, if not a gently clashing polytonality.

Upcoming Events of the SeventyFourth Season of The William

Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot

Belin Concerts

Bennewitz Quartet

Music by Czech composers

February 21, Sunday, 3:30

West Building, West Garden Court

BEETHOVEN TRIO FEST

Complete instrumental trios of Ludwig

van Beethoven in four days. Sponsored by

the Billy Rose Foundation.

Concerts in the West Building,

West Garden Court

Members of Inscape

Beethoven Trios

February 25, Thursday, 12:00 and 2:00

Mendelssohn Piano Trio

Beethoven Trios

February 26, Friday, 12:00 and 2:00

DEKA Trio

Beethoven Trios

February 27, Saturday, 12:00 and 2:00

North Carolina Symphony Trio

Beethoven Trios

February 28, Sunday, 12:00 and 2:00

West Garden Trio

National Gallery of Art Orchestra

Dingwall Fleary, guest conductor

Triple Concerto

February 28, Sunday, 4:00

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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www.twitter.com/ngadc

www.facebook.com/nationalgalleryofart

The department of music produced these

program notes. Copyright © 2016 Board of

Trustees, National Gallery ofArt, Washington

Cover Francois Boucher, Allegory of Music

(detail), 1764, National Gallery of Art,

Washington, Samuel H. Kress Collection

Back cover West Building, East Garden 

Court, Photo by Rob Shelley, National Gallery

of Art, Washington