76TH SEASON OF CONCERTS

OCTOBER 1, 2017 / NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
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Program

Curtis on Tour

Maria Ioudenitch, violin

Andrea Obiso, violin

Roberto Díaz, viola

Michael Casimir, viola

Joshua Halpern, cello

Young In Na, cello

OCTOBER 1, 2017 / 3:30

WEST BUILDING, WEST GARDEN COURT

Kevin Puts (b. 1972)

Arcana 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)

Grande Sestetto Concertante 

(after Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major, K. 364)

Allegro maestoso 

Andante

Presto

Intermission

Johannes Brahms (1833–1897)

String Sextet in B-flat Major, no. 1, op. 18 

Allegro ma non troppo 

Andante ma moderato

Scherzo: Allegro molto

Rondo: Poco allegretto e grazioso

Program subject to change.

Photo by Pete Checchia
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The Musicians

CURTIS INSTITUTE OF MUSIC

Drawing upon ninety years of artistry, the Curtis Institute of Music pairs tradition 

and innovation, educating exceptionally gifted young musicians as artist-citizens who 

engage local and global communities through music-making of the highest caliber. 

Each year, 175 students come to Curtis, drawn by a tuition-free, performance-inspired 

learning culture that is nurtured by a celebrated faculty. The school’s distinctive 

“learn by doing” approach results in more than two hundred concerts each year in 

Philadelphia, as well as performances around the world through Curtis on Tour.

Known as one of the world’s finest music academies, Curtis reaches global 

audiences through Curtis Performs, the school’s dedicated HD performance video 

site. Online music courses and Curtis Summerfest programs offer lifelong learners 

other ways to listen, explore, and learn. And students hone twenty-first-century 

skills through social entrepreneurship programs that bring arts access and education 

to the community. 

The extraordinary young musicians of Curtis graduate to join 4,000 alumni who 

have long made music history. Each season, leading orchestras, opera houses, and 

chamber music series around the world feature Curtis alumni. They are in the front 

rank of soloists, composers, and conductors and hold principal chairs in every major 

American orchestra. Curtis graduates are musical leaders, making a profound impact 

on music onstage and in their communities.

CURTIS ON TOUR

Curtis on Tour is the Nina von Maltzahn Global Touring Initiative of the Curtis 

Institute of Music. An embodiment of the school’s “learn by doing” philosophy, 

it offers students professional touring experience alongside celebrated alumni 

and faculty. In addition to performances, musicians offer master classes, interactive 

programs, and community engagement activities while on tour. Curtis on Tour 

also facilitates solo performances of Curtis students and alumni with professional 

orchestras and recital series. Since the program was established in 2008, students, 

faculty, and alumni have performed more than two hundred concerts in Europe, 

Asia, and the Americas.

MARIA IOUDENITCH 

Maria Ioudenitch, from Balashov, Russia, entered the Curtis Institute of Music in 

2014 and studies violin with Shmuel Ashkenasi and Pamela Frank. Ioudenitch has 

appeared as a soloist with the Kansas City and Tupelo Symphonies; the Mississippi 

Symphony Orchestra; the Mariinsky Orchestra; the Prince George’s Philharmonic; 

and the National Symphony of Uzbekistan. Her awards include first prize at the 

Kansas City Young Artist Competition and second prize at the Johansen International 

Competition for Young String Players. Ioudenitch was also invited to perform for 

Van Cliburn at the celebration of the 50th anniversary of his triumph at the First 

Tchaikovsky International Competition in Moscow, and she has been heard on 

NPR’s From the Top.

Ioudenitch has attended Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute and has participated in 

master classes with Midori, Gil Shaham, and Pinchas Zukerman, as well as master 

classes at the International Summer Academy at Universität Mozarteum. She began 

studying violin at age three and piano at age nine. Her previous teachers include 

Gregory Sandomirsky and Ben Sayevich.

ANDREA OBISO 

Andrea Obiso, from Palermo, Italy, entered the Curtis Institute of Music in 2016 

and studies violin with Aaron Rosand. Obiso made his solo debut with the Orchestra 

Sinfonica Siciliana at the age of twelve. Since then, he has appeared as soloist with 

Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma, Orchestra del Teatro Massimo Bellini di Catania, 

Orkest der Lage Landen, the Moscow Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra, Limburgs 

Symfonie Orkest, the State Youth Orchestra of Armenia, and the Central Aichi 

Symphony Orchestra, among several other ensembles.

Obiso appears frequently on television and radio in Italy. Among his many 

awards are second prize at the 2015 Aram Khachaturian International Violin 

Competition, the Special Prize for Virtuosic Performance at the Sixth International 

Tchaikovsky Competition for Young Musicians, and first prizes in another eleven 

competitions across Italy.

Obiso began violin lessons at age six. He holds degrees in violin performance 

from the Conservatorium Maastricht and Conservatorio di Musica Vincenzo Bellini, 

where he studied with Boris Belkin. Obiso performs on a 1741 Joseph Guarneri del 

Gesù violin on loan from the Yellow Angel nonprofit organization.
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ROBERTO DÍAZ 

A violist of international reputation, Roberto Díaz is president and CEO of the 

Curtis Institute of Music. As a soloist, Díaz collaborates with leading conductors 

of our time on stages throughout the world. He also has worked directly with 

important composers, most notably Krzysztof Penderecki, whose viola concerto 

he has performed numerous times with the composer on the podium and whose 

Double Concerto he premiered in the United States.

A frequent recitalist, Díaz enjoys collaborating with young musicians, bringing 

a fresh approach to the repertoire. He has performed with major string quartets 

and pianists in chamber music series and festivals worldwide and is a member of the 

Díaz Trio. His recordings include a Grammy-nominated disc of viola transcriptions 

by William Primrose for Naxos, as well as releases on the Artek, Bridge Records, 

Dorian, Nimbus, and New World labels.

In addition to his decade-long tenure as principal viola of the Philadelphia 

Orchestra, Díaz was also principal viola of the National Symphony under Mstislav 

Rostropovich and a member of the Boston Symphony and the Minnesota Orchestras. 

He is a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music and the Curtis Institute 

of Music, where he continues to serve on the faculty, holding the James and Betty 

Matarese Chair in Viola Studies and the Nina von Maltzahn President’s Chair. Díaz 

plays the ex-Primrose Amati viola.

MICHAEL CASIMIR 

Michael Casimir, from Philadelphia, entered the Curtis Institute of Music in 2015 

and studies viola with Roberto Díaz and Hsin-Yun Huang. Casimir appeared as a 

soloist with the Hudson Valley Philharmonic in 2014, after winning first place in the 

orchestra’s string competition in 2013. His other solo appearances include venues in 

South Africa, Spain, Brazil, and Japan. Casimir has collaborated with many renowned 

musicians, including Shmuel Ashkenasi, Emanuel Ax, and Christoph Henkel. In 

2016, he performed with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble. His other honors 

include second-place prizes at the Sphinx Competition in 2011 and 2015.

Casimir, who began violin lessons at the age of two, received his bachelor of 

music degree from the Juilliard School, where he studied with Heidi Castleman and 

Misha Amory. His other teachers have included Lee Snyder, Peter Slowik, and Milan 

Vitek. He has attended the Tanglewood Music Center, the Greenwood Music Camp, 

the Heifetz International Music Institute, the Perlman Music Program, and the 

Sejong International Music Festival. 

JOSHUA HALPERN 

Joshua Halpern, from Dayton, Ohio, entered the Curtis Institute of Music in 2016 

and studies with Carter Brey, principal cello of the New York Philharmonic, and 

Peter Wiley, former cellist of the Guarneri Quartet. Halpern is the Crescendo Club 

Annual Fellow at Curtis. He has won top prizes at the Fischoff National Chamber 

Music Association Competition, the Music Teachers National Association Senior 

Strings Competition, and the Shepherd School of Music Concerto Competition. He 

has performed as a soloist with the Miami Valley Symphony and Starling Chamber 

Orchestras and will appear with the Shepherd School Symphony Orchestra in the 

2017–2018 season. 

As a chamber musician, Halpern has collaborated with such artists as Itzhak 

Perlman, Jon Kimura Parker, and Richie Hawley and has worked with Gary Hoffman, 

Laurence Lesser, Robert McDonald, and members of the Borromeo and Emerson 

Quartets. He has participated in several festivals, including Music Academy of the 

West, the Taos School of Music, the Perlman Music Program, Ravinia’s Steans Music 

Institute, and the New York String Orchestra Seminar. 

Halpern holds a bachelor of music degree from the Shepherd School of Music 

at Rice University. He began cello lessons at the age of ten and has previously studied 

with Desmond Hoebig and Alan Rafferty.

YOUNG IN NA

Young In Na, from Seoul, Korea, entered the Curtis Institute of Music in 2013 and 

studies cello with Peter Wiley. All students at Curtis receive merit-based, full-tuition 

scholarships, and Na is the Joseph Druian Fellow. Na has performed as a soloist with 

the Yewon Orchestra and has been featured on the Korean Broadcasting System, as 

well as the European cultural channel ARTE. She has also played solo and chamber 

recitals in Trio Dono with the support of Kumho Asiana. 

Na has participated in the Calahorra Music Festival in Spain and the Montpellier 

Music Festival in France. She has been a finalist or prizewinner in several competitions, including the 2012 Johansen International Competition in Washington, DC, the 

2009 and 2010 Junior Tchaikovsky Competitions, and the 2009 Moscow Tchaikovsky 

Central Music School International String Junior Competition. 
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Program Notes

About his work Arcana, composer Kevin Puts writes:

Each night on the Hawaiian island of Maui, the immense 

volcano Haleakala sleeps soundly by the light of moon until 

around three AM when several dozen tourists create an unbroken 

parade of headlights along the long and winding drive to the 

summit. The sunrise as witnessed from here was described by 

Mark Twain as one of the “sublimest spectacles” of his life, and 

what it reveals is equally remarkable. In absolute silence above 

the cloud layer below, a Martian terrain of red dust and oddly 

placed meteoric-looking rock plays host to a number of arcane 

sights: the ‘ ̄ahinahina (silversword) plant must have been even 

more alien to the ancient Hawaiians who presumably had 

nothing else silver in their lives. It lives for fifty years and 

only flowers once, then dies. Exotic birds such as petrels, 

honeycreepers, and the rare nene (Hawaiian goose) squawk 

about. At the bottom of the enormous crater, giant cinder cones 

rise up like something out of the old Star Trek episodes. But as 

the eye continues along to the east towards the town of Hana, 

the austerity of dust and hardened lava gives way to a scene of 

almost impossible beauty, a tumbling waterfall of clouds pouring 

endlessly over the crater’s rim and dissolving into thin air.

The magnificent Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major, K. 364, for violin, viola, and 

orchestra, is Mozart’s only surviving complete work of this type, which is essentially a 

hybrid of a symphony and a concerto. Generally scored for two or more solo instruments and orchestra, the sinfonia concertante form was particularly popular in Paris 

in the eighteenth century. In 1808, an unknown arranger made a transcription of 

Mozart’s great work for string sextet, heard on today’s program. It should be noted 

that Curtis on Tour performed the complete, original work here at the Gallery in 

January 2017. Those in the audience who were fortunate to have heard that performance may hear some subtle differences between the original and the scaled-down 

versions, most notably that instead of two soloists and an orchestra behind them, all 

six instruments play equal roles throughout the piece.

Known for its warm expansiveness, the work is set in three movements: The 

opening Allegro maestoso bursts with joy, yet is followed by one of Mozart’s rare, 

minor-key slow movements, a plaintive and lengthy Andante. The final Presto 

brings back the joyful spirit, with irrepressible gaiety.

Johannes Brahms completed his String Sextet in B-flat Major, no. 1, op. 18, in 

1860. It is in four movements and slightly less than forty minutes in duration. The 

composer was still in his twenties when he wrote this work, and while it clearly 

bears his artistic stamp, it also betrays the strength of his early influences, including 

Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. Early works such as these make it sometimes difficult to determine the true direction of Brahms’s musical vision except 

that he loved the music that had been coming out of Vienna for the past hundred 

years. However, it is also true that the full romantic writing of the generation 

directly preceding his own—that of Schumann, who discovered and promoted 

Brahms—is absent in Brahms’s compositions. This first sextet reveals an especially 

acute understanding of Schubert’s later writing. There is as much classical order 

in this sextet as romantic leanings. The use of a string sextet as an ensemble was 

comparatively new. Louis Spohr (1784–1859) provided the only notable precedent. 

Brahms is also partial to certain baroque conventions, such as the fugato in the 

Andante second movement.

The first String Sextet was written in the summertime, while Brahms was 

vacationing on the banks of the Elbe. Its ineluctable, Viennese strains seem to come 

through in spite of his pride in being a tough kid from Hamburg. The sweetness of 

Vienna’s indigenous sound comes through in this work, which is perhaps why it keeps 

reconfiguring its textures, resisting the urge to bathe in the loveliness of the city’s 

soundscape. That was the bizarre danger about Vienna that this sextet works with; it 

is a city that loves music, especially its waltzes and its famous composers. Becoming 

part of that scene can easily reduce a musician to an imitator, making Vienna undesirable, yet it is ironically a mecca for composers. While Wagner and Schumann broke 

with Vienna’s expectations, Brahms worked with them, loved the city’s paradox, and 

never allowed musical sleaze to get the upper hand. His music is so eventful because 

he did not want to be pinned onto a dance floor laden with waltzing Viennese locals. 

It was a strange risk to take but it resulted in wonderfully enduring music.
Upcoming Events of the SeventySixth Season of The William

Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot

Belin Concerts

Unless otherwise noted, all programs 

take place in the West Building, 

West Garden Court. —

The Canales Project, in partnership 

with TEDxMidAtlantic

Sandeep Das, tabla

Lara Downes, piano

Kaoru Watanabe, shinobue bamboo flute

October 8, 3:30 —

Dalí Quartet

With Orlando Cotto, percussion

Music by Ricardo Lorenz, Guido LópezGavilan, and Jorge Mazón–Rico Melao 

October 15, 3:30 —

Lina Bahn, violin, and 

Matt Haimovitz, cello

With Artichoke Dance Company

Voices of the Ocean

October 22, 3:30 —

Pomerium

Flemish Musical Mastery in the 

Age of Bosch and Bloemaert

Celebrating Bosch to Bloemaert: Early 

Netherlandish Drawings from the Museum 

Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

October 29, 3:30

Orpheus Chamber Orchestra

Octets by Jean Françaix 

and Franz Schubert

November 5, 3:30 —

The Crossing

With members of ICE

Music by Ted Hearne, David Lang, 

and Caroline Shaw

November 12, 3:30 —

Mantra Percussion

Michael Gordon, Timber

Celebrating Jackson Pollock’s Mural

November 19, 3:30 —

LACE (Living Art Collective Ensemble)

Salon-style concerts with music by 

Boccherini, Brillon, and Mozart

Celebrating Fragonard: The Fantasy Figures

November 24–25, 2:00 & 4:00

West Building, East Garden Court —

New York Opera Society

The Three Lives of Rosina Almaviva

Celebrating Fragonard: The Fantasy Figures

November 26, 3:30 —

Inna Faliks and Daniel Schlosberg 

Gustav Mahler, Symphony no. 6, 

arranged for piano, four-hands, 

by Alexander von Zemlinsky

December 3, 3:30 —

Caroling in the Rotunda

December 9, 10, 16 & 17, 1:30 & 2:30

Mary Heilman, Melody, 1998, National Gallery 

of Art, Washington, Gift of Kathan Brown
www.nga.gov/music

Admission to the National Gallery of Art 

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except as noted.

The use of cameras or recording equipment during the performance is not 

allowed. Please be sure that all portable 

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The department of music produced 

these program notes. Copyright © 2017 

Board of Trustees, National Gallery of 

Art, Washington

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.