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The Seventy-second Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery ofArt

2,983rd Concert

Sara Davis Buechner, pianist

March 9, 2014

Sunday, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Admissionfree
Program

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Sonata in E-jlat Major, K. 282 (1774)

Adagio

Minuetto I —Minuetto 2

Allegro

Anton Arensky (1861-1906)

Four Salon Pieces

Ionics, op. 28, no. 3 (1893-1894)

Etude in E-sharp Major, op. 41, no. 2 (1896)

Excerpts from Pres de la mer (By the Sea), op. 52, no. 4 (1901)

No. 4: Allegro moderato

No. 5: Allegro scherzando

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

Trois mouvements de Petrouchka (1921)

Danse russe (Russian Dance)

Chez Petrouchka (In Petrushka’s Room)

La Semaine grasse (The Shrovetide Fair)

INTERMISSION

Dana Suesse (1909-1987)

Four Pieces for Piano

Jazz Nocturne (1931)

Scherzette: “Whirligig” (1940)

Bacardi, from The Cocktail Suite (1942)

Night Sky (1947)

George Gershwin (1898-1937)

Three Foxtrots from Acoustic Recordings and Player Piano Rolls

Do-Do-Do (1926)

Novelette in Fourths (1919)

Kickin’ the Clouds Away (1925)
The Musician

A prize-winner at the Reine Elisabeth of Belgium Competition and the piano

competitions of Leeds, Salzburg, Sydney, and Vienna, pianist Sara Davis

Buechner launched her career by winning the Gold Medal at the 1984 Gina

Bachauer International Piano Competition. Praised by the New York Times

for her “intelligence, integrity, and all-encompassing technical prowess” and

the Washington Post for her “thoughtful artistry in the full service ofmusic,”

she concertizes regularly in Asia, where the Philippine Star attested to her

“fascinating and astounding virtuosity,” and Japan’s In Tune magazine

proclaimed, “Buechner has no superior.”

With an active repertoire ofmore than one hundred piano concertos,

Buechner has appeared as soloist with the symphony orchestras of Cleveland, Montreal, New York, Philadelphia, Saint Louis, and San Francisco

as well as those ofVancouver and Victoria, British Columbia the Hollywood Bowl, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, Kyoto’s Alti Hall, and Prague’s

Dvorak Hall. Two of Buechner’s recordings have received acclaim from

reviewers in the New York Times, who greeted her Koch International CD

of piano music by Rudolf Lriml as a “revelation” and devoted the front page

ofthe Sunday Arts & Leisure section to her world premiere recording of

the Bach-Busoni “Goldberg” Variations. Her Gershwin album was selected

as a Record ofthe Month by Stereophile magazine, and her recording of

piano concertos by Bernard Herrmann and Lranz Waxman won Germany’s

Deutscher Schallplattenpreis.

An enthusiastic champion of contemporary music, Buechner has

commissioned new works and played numerous premieres. Among the

composers with whom she has collaborated are Larry Bell, Dorothy Chang,

John Corigliano, Richard Danielpour, Miriam Hyde, Jared Miller, Joaquin

Nin-Culmell, David Raksin, Miklos Rozsa, and Yukiko Nishimura. A former

pupil of Rudolf Lirkusny and Byron Janis at the Juilliard School of Music

and an associate professor of piano at the University ofBritish Columbia,

Sara Davis Buechner appears at the National Gallery by arrangement with

Carrie Leiner Enterprises, www.feinerent.com.

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Program Notes

A child prodigy and virtuoso, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed his first 

sonatas for the keyboard at age eighteen, by which time he already had

completed more than two-hundred compositions. Between December 1774

and January 1775, he traveled to Munich with his father to supervise the

premiere ofhis opera buffa, Lafinta giardiniera. During this period he wrote

his first six sonatas, with the successive keys moving through the circle-offifths key progression (C, L, B-flat, E-flat, then skipping to the sharp keys for 

G and D). The fourth ofthe Munich sonatas, the Sonata in E-flat Major, K. 282, 

opens unconventionally with an Adagio. Throughout this movement, the right

hand carries the melody and the left accompanies. Neither ofthe two Minuets

contains a trio, but the second one contains more thematic development and

harmonic variety than would be expected in such a short movement. Written

in strict sonata-allegro form, the finale contains a short development section

and foregoes the customary coda. The primary motive here is the octave leap,

a gesture that Mozart restates and develops thoroughly.

As a student, Anton Arensky studied with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov at the

Saint Petersburg Conservatory. In later years, as a professor at the Moscow Conservatory, Arensky influenced rising talents Alexander Scriabin and Sergei 

Rachmaninoff. Arensky has not received as much attention as many of his

Russian contemporaries, chiefly due to his stylistic proximity to Tchaikovsky,

whom he revered. In fact, one ofhis most popular compositions for orchestra

is his Variations on a Theme ofTchaikovsky.

Having earned substantial praise as a pianist, Arensky felt at home

composing chamber and solo piano music. Ofthe four salon pieces that

Sara Davis Buechner has included in tonight’s program, Ionics is the third of

six Studies ofForgotten Rhythms, which Arensky composed between 1893 and

1894. The Etude in F-sharp Majoris a lively, motoric piece with perpetual-motion sixteenth notes in the right hand, while “Allegro moderato” and “Allegro 

scherzando” are the fourth and fifth movements from Arensky’s suite Pres

5
de la mer (By the Sea). In G-flat major, the Allegro moderato features a lyrical

middle section surrounded by running triplets as opening and closing

passages. The Allegro scherzando is a “Dumka,” a Slavic genre characterized

by sudden changes from melancholy to exuberance.

In 1910, following the overwhelming success ofhis ballet, The Firebird, Igor 

Stravinsky began to set his sights on The Rite ofSpring for the Ballets Russes’

1913 season. However, the company director, Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929), 

intervened with plans for a ballet based on the folk tales about Petrushka, which

he planned to present in 1911. Stravinsky responded with an orchestral piece

featuring the piano as a solo instrument. Taking his cue from the stories in

which Petrushka is an irrepressible prankster, Stravinsky cast the piano as a

mischievous puppet, trying the patience ofthe orchestra with what he termed

“diabolical cascades of arpeggios.” Stravinsky enhanced the harmonic mischief

by superimposing two major triads offset by a tritone, which in the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries had come to be known as the “devil’s interval.” In

1921, at the behest ofArthur Rubinstein (1887-1982), Stravinsky adapted the

ballet score into a three-movement fantasia for solo piano.

American composer and lyricist Dana Suesse displayed an early talent

for adapting themes to music and words. She toured the Midwest in her

youth, framing her vaudeville acts around spontaneously adapted ideas from

the audience. Her 1931 hit, Jazz Nocturne, earned her the nickname “The

Girl Gershwin” from the New Yorker. A pupil of Nadia Boulanger in Paris 

in the 1940s, Suesse continued to enjoy artistic and commercial success

throughout her lifetime, including a concert at Carnegie Hall in 1974.

Another Boulanger student, George Gershwin blended his classical 

training and his jazz background into a successful and uniquely American

voice. In 1916 he began working for two firms in New York that produced

piano rolls—Aeolian Company and Standard Music Rolls. He produced

over one hundred piano rolls under his own name and various aliases,

among them James Baker, Fred Murtha, Bert Wynn, and George Wynne,

6

which provided a stable source ofincome in the early part of his career. Even

after his compositions for musical theater began to earn him substantially

larger fees, he continued to record his greatest hits on piano rolls throughout the 1920s. “Do-Do-Do” is a song from the musical Oh, Kay!, while

“Kickin’ the Clouds Away” is from Tell Me More. “Novelette in Fourths” is a

ragtime piece that Gershwin composed as an early attempt to fuse classical

and vernacular musical styles.

Program notes by Michael Jacko, music program assistant, National Gallery ofArt