The use of cameras or recording equipment during the

performance is not allowed. Please be sure that cell phones,

pagers, and other electronic devices are turned off.

Please note that late entry or reentry of

the West Building after 6:30 pm is not permitted.

For the convenience of concertgoers the Garden Cafe

remains open for light refreshments until 6:00 pm on Sundays.

Music Department

National Gallery of Art

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue nw

Washington, DC

Mailing address

2000b South Club Drive

Landover, md 20785

www.nga.gov

cover: Constantin Brancusi, Womans Head, c. 1910,

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund

The Sixty-eighth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery ofArt

2,763rd Concert

Auryn String Quartet

Matthias Lingenfelder, violin

Jens Oppermann, violin

Stewart Eaton, viola

Andreas Arndt, violoncello

January 27, 2010

Wednesday, 12:10 pm 

West Building Lecture Hall

Admissionfree
Program

Alban Berg (1885-1935)

String Quartet, op. 3 (1910)

Langsam

Maessiges Viertel

Bela Bartok (1881-1945)

String Quartet no. 1 in A Minor, op. 7 (1908)

Lento

Allegretto

Allegro vivace

The Musicians

AURYN QUARTET

In 2010 the four musicians ofthe Auryn Quartet celebrate twenty-nine years

ofworking together as an ensemble. Audiences and critics in Europe and

the United States are uniformly enthusiastic about the quartet’s performances.

The Sunday Herald of Edinburgh, Scotland, wrote, “This superb ensemble

from Cologne simply came on stage and played, immediately radiating a

palpable joy in music-making, and projecting a real sense of communication

and contact with the audience,” while American Record Guide noted “The 

Auryn plays with an enviable balance of abandon and discipline.”

The quartet has marked several important milestones in recent years.

In 2007 its recording on the Tacet label ofthe complete Beethoven string

quartets was released to ecstatic reviews. That same year the quartet founded

a new chamber music festival in Este, Italy. In 2009 the ensemble recorded

all sixty-eight of Elaydn’s string quartets, and performed them in concert in

Padua, Italy, and Cologne, Germany. This year its members will serve collectively as artistic advisors to Musiktage Mondsee, a prestigious music festival

in Upper Austria that numbers among its previous music directors Andras

SchifL, Christian Altenberger, and Heinrich Schiff.

First violinist Matthias Lingenfelder was born in Germany in 1959, and 

started playing the violin at the age ofseven. He studied with Klaus Eichholz,

Max Rostal, and Gerard Poulet. In 1981 he cofounded the Auryn Quartet. Prior 

to his full-time involvement with the quartet, he was the concertmaster of

the European Community Youth Orchestra and a cofounder ofthe Chamber

Orchestra of Europe. It was as concertmaster with that orchestra that he

played as soloist under guest conductors Claudio Abbado and Sir Georg Solti.

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Second violinist Jens Oppermann was born in i960. He began his violin 

studies at age twelve, and within two years, he had won a prize in the

German national competition Jugend Musiziert. The recipient of numerous

scholarships and prizes, Oppermann played in the National Youth Orchestra

of Germany, the Hamburg City Opera Orchestra, and the European Community Youth Orchestra. It was through his work with that ensemble and

the Chamber Orchestra of Europe that Oppermann became acquainted

with Mathias Lingenfelder and joined him in forming the Auryn Quartet.

Violist Stewart Eaton was bom in Aylesbury, United Kingdom. He studied

viola and piano at the Royal College of Music, receiving its prestigious entrance

scholarship. His teachers were Frederick Riddle and Margaret Major, and he

took part in master classes with Hugh Bean and Yfrah Neaman. From 1979-

1981, at the invitation ofClaudio Abbado, Eaton was the principal violist ofthe 

Orchestra Teatro alia Scala in Milan. He also served as principal violist ofthe

Chamber Orchestra of Europe, which he left to become a founding member

ofthe Auryn Quartet. He has performed as a viola soloist at expo 2000 in

Hanover and at the Rheingau Festival in Wiesbaden, Germany. He teaches

at the Musikhochschule in Detmold, Germany.

Cellist Andreas Amdt was born in Heidelberg, Germany, where he began

to play the piano at the age offive. At age twelve he took up the cello, studying

with Georg Ulrich von Buelow. He continued his studies with Wolfgang 

Boettcher in Berlin and Johannes Goritzki in Diisseldorf. Amdt was a prizewinner at many competitions, and received several scholarships. A member

ofthe European Community Youth Orchestra, he also played in the Berlin 

Philharmonic Orchestra and the Guerzenich Orchestra in Cologne. From

1983-1986 he taught at the Freie Kunsthochschule in Bonn. Arndt is likewise 

a founding member ofthe Auryn Quartet. In addition to his chamber music

activity, he is a teacher and juror at various master classes and competitions.

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Program Notes

This concert is the fourth in a series offive National Gallery ofArt concerts that

present masterworks from the years 1610,1710,1810,1910, and 2010. On Sunday,

January 17, the National Gallery ofArt Vocal Ensemble and the early music

ensembles artek and Piffaro performed Claudio Monteverdi s Vespro della

Beata Vergine, commonly identified as his “Vespers of 1610.” On January 20, 

organist and Gallery music department head Stephen Ackert joined mezzosoprano Anne-Marieke Evers and members ofthe National Gallery ofArt

Chamber Players to perform music that would have been heard in 1710 in 

the ducal chapel in Weimar, Germany, where Johann Sebastian Bach was the

organist and composer-in-residence. On January 24, three ofthe National 

Gallery’s resident ensembles presented masterworks that Beethoven produced

or published in 1810. On Sunday, January 31, the new music ensemble Great 

Noise will combine with the nga Vocal Ensemble and the nga Orchestra to

complete the series with world premiere performances oftwo new works, 

written especially for the occasion by Carlos Carrillo, and Armando Bayolo,

who will conduct the concert.

In this concert, the Auryn String Quartet plays Alban Berg’s String Quartet,

op. 3, one ofthe great chamber works written in 1910. It is the last work the

composer produced under the tutelage ofArnold Schoenberg. First perfomed

in 1911 and published nine years later, the two-movement quartet was not well

received at its premiere and received no further performances for more than a

decade. Schoenberg, however, admired the piece, and the work may rightly be 

regarded as an appropriate valedictory for Berg’s transition from apprenticeship to musical maturity. According to Berg’s wife, Helene, the inspiration for

the quartet was bom ofthe frustration both she and Berg experienced when

Helene’s father forbade the two lovers to see each other. In this work, Berg

takes a great step beyond the compositional idiom of his Piano Sonata, op. 1

(1907-1908), and the Four Songs, op. 2 (1909-1910). The thematic craftsmanship bears a relationship to that ofthe earlier piano sonata, but the quartet

is far more complex. Whereas tonality had restricted Berg’s language in

the earlier work, the free atonal idiom ofthe quartet allowed the composer

to develop his material with unprecedented freedom and variety.

5
In the first movement, Berg establishes a web ofmotivic relationships

within sonata form. The opening theme bears a striking resemblance to a

theme from Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht (1899) and is built on a slightly

modified whole-tone scale that would reappear in the opera Wozzeck (1917—

1922). A transformation ofthis theme becomes a fundamental figure in the

second movement, which again contains material similar to that in the work

of another composer: the love duet from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde

(1857-1859). Scholars disagree on the formal design ofthis movement but

tend to describe it as a type of rondo or sonata-rondo.

Berg’s idiomatic writing for the string quartet, his use ofmotives and

passages derived from cycles ofintervals, his attention to detail, and the

relationship of every detail to the whole, all point to the work of a composer

assured in technique and possessed of a distinctive musical personality.

Bela Bartok’s String Quartet no. 1 in A Minor (opus 7) comes from

what is now identified as his early period (approximately 1900 to 1910),

when he was still emulating to some extent the chromatic lyricism of

the late romantic composers. Particular references to Hungarian folk 

music— such as rhythmic emphasis on offbeats and ostinatos, which

became prominent in many of his later works — appear very subtly in this

quartet. The first movement is polyphonic in texture and moves without

pause into a homophonic Allegretto that can be identified as a second

movement. The Allegro vivace can also be understood as two movements

that flow one into the next, the first a recitative and the second a sharply

rhythmic dance. A plan ofincreasingly rapid tempi prevails, beginning

with the opening lento, and passing through allegretto, allegro, and finally

allegro vivace. A motifis introduced by the solo violin early in the first

movement. This motif appears repeatedly as a briefflitter throughout

the second movement, and matures to become the theme of a fugato in

the last movement.

Program notes by Stephen Ackert and Danielle DeSweri Hahn

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Upcoming Concerts at the National Gallery of Art

National Gallery ofArt Orchestra

with the National Gallery ofArt Vocal Ensemble

and Great Noise Ensemble

New Works by Armando Bayolo and Carlos Carrillo

January 31, 2010

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

New York Opera Society

Jonah Blum, music director

Music by George Gershwin

Presented in honor of

From Impressionism to Modernism:

The Chester Dale Collection

February 3, 2010

Wednesday, 12:10 pm

West Building Lecture Hall