For the convenience of concertgoers 

the Garden Cafe remains open until 6:oo pm.

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.

Music Department

National Gallery ofArt

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue NW

Washington, DC

Mailing address

2000B South Club Drive

Landover, md 20785

www.nga.gov

cover: Paul Cezanne, The Artist’s Son, Paul, 1885-1890,

National Gallery ofArt, Washington, Chester Dale Collection

The Sixty-eighth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery ofArt

2,783rd Concert

Virginia Virtuosi

Nancy Jin, violin

Tiffany Richardson, viola

Mark Bergman, double bass

with

Annette Chang-Barger, violin

Danielle Cho, cello, and Sophia Kim-Cook, piano

Presented in honor of From Impressionism to Modernism:

The Chester Dale Collection

April 18, 2010 

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Admissionfree
Program

Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869)

The Banjo

George Gershwin (1898-1937)

Lullaby

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Mother Goose Suite

1. Pavane de Belle au bois dormant

2. Petit Poucet

3. Laideronnette, Imperatrice des Pagodes

4. Les Entretiens de la Belle at la Bete

5. Le Jardin feerique

INTERMISSION

Walter Piston (1894-1976)

Three Counterpoints

1. Espressivo con moto

2. Adagio sereno

3. Allego spiccato

Darius Milhaud (1892-1974)

Concert suite from The Creation ofthe World

1. Prelude

2. Fugue

3. Romance

4. Scherzo

5. Final

The Musicians

VIRGINIA VIRTUOSI

Winner ofthe first annual Alumni Ventures award from Yale University in 

2008, the string trio Virginia Virtuosi performs chamber music in innovative ways that listeners have described as “turning classical music cool” (The

Fairfax Connection). In addition to performances at the Corcoran Gallery of

Art and the Kennedy Center, Virginia Virtuosi partners with the Arlington 

Public Schools and the Virginia Commission for the Arts to provide interactive musical programs for youth and adults in Virginia, Maryland, and

Washington, DC.

NANCY JIN

Violinist Nancy Jin enjoys an active career as an orchestral player, chamber

musician, and teacher in the metropolitan DC area. A native of Fairfax,

Virginia, Jin currently plays in the Amadeus Orchestra, the Fairfax Symphony,

the National Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Virginia Chamber Orchestra. 

In previous years she has played in the National Symphony Orchestra and

the Richmond Symphony Orchestra. She is a former member ofthe Hartford 

Symphony Orchestra. In 2009 Jin was a soloist with the Winchester Orchestra of Virginia, performing two movements from The Four Seasons by Vivaldi.

Jin is a founding member of Virginia Virtuosi and a member ofthe Sage

Chamber Players. A dedicated pedagogue, she is a certified Suzuki teacher 

with a thriving studio of violin students in Ashburn, Virginia. A recipient of

undergraduate and graduate degrees from The Cleveland Institute of Music

and the Yale University School of Music, Jin has studied under Syoko Aki,

Linda Cerone, and Vernon Summers and coached with members ofthe 

Tokyo and Miami String Quartets.

TIFFANY RICHARDSON

An avid chamber musician and founding member of Virginia Virtuosi,

violist Tiffany Richardson holds degrees from the University of Maryland

School of Music at College Park and the New England Conservatory of Music

3
in Boston. As an orchestral musician, she has performed with the New

World Symphony, the Saint Louis Symphony, and the Richmond Symphony,

and has participated in the Aspen Music Festival, Festival Mozaic, and 

Spoleto Festival USA. Her most recent engagements include the Left Bank

Chamber Society and the Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center.

A strong supporter of contemporary music, Richardson performed the

United States premiere of Arvo Part’s LAbbe Agathon at the Aspen Music

Festival, and she can be heard on several world premiere recordings as a

member ofthe Boston Modern Orchestra Project. She has studied with

Ralph Fielding, Daniel Foster, Carol Rodland, and Michael Tree. A devoted

teacher, Richardson enjoys teaching and coaching students from local youth 

orchestras and high schools.

MARK BERGMAN

Double bassist, educator, and composer Mark Bergman currentiy serves on

the faculty of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Fie is a founding

member ofthe Virginia Virtuosi, solo bassist with the Assisi Music Festival

in Italy, and a member ofthe Peter Britt Festival Orchestra (Jacksonville,

Oregon). Bergman formerly served as the principal double bassist with the 

New Flaven Symphony Orchestra and the Mato Grosso Chamber Orchestra

in Cuiaba, Brazil, and was a member ofthe Flartford Symphony Orchestra’s

double bass section. A graduate ofthe Yale School of Music, Bergman is

completing a doctoral degree in the scholarship ofteaching and learning.

An author as well as a performer, he is an educational developer for Oxford

University Press and has written a book about American popular music that

is scheduled for publication in this fall by Cognella Academic Publishers. 

Bergman’s compositions have been performed in North America, South

America, and Europe by Assisi Performing Arts, the Connecticut Chamber

Players, the Mato Grosso Chamber Orchestra, the Philharmonic Orchestra

ofthe Americas, the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra, and other ensembles.

He was a winner of composition contests sponsored by the British International Bass Forum and Kappa Gamma Psi and was featured twice on the 

blog Bowed Radio.

4

ANNETTE CHANG-BARGER

Violinist Annette Chang-Barger holds a bachelor’s degree from Brown

University and graduate degrees from Yale University and the New England

Conservatory of Music. She has been a member ofthe symphony orchestras

of Hartford and New Haven, as well as the New World Symphony Orchestra

and the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra. She has attended the Tanglewood Music Center and has participated in numerous music festivals,

including the Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival, the Norfolk Music

Festival, and the Pacific Music Festival. She resides in Springfield, Virginia,

with her two sons, Noah and Lewis.

DANIELLE CHO

A native of Los Angeles, Danielle Cho has performed throughout Asia,

Europe, and the United States. Awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, she studied

with cellist Lluis Claret, who is the godson of Pablo Casals, in Barcelona,

Spain. In 2008-2009 she was a member ofthe Palau de Les Arts Orchestra

in Valencia, Spain, under the direction of Lorin Maazel and Zubin Mehta. A

dedicated contemporary music advocate, she has performed new music at

the Lucerne Festival Academy, where she worked with Pierre Boulez and the 

Ensemble Intercontemporain; Santa Fe New Music; and the Spoleto USA

Festival “Music in Time” series. Additional festival appearances include the 

Holland Music Sessions; the International Musicians’ Seminar at Prussia

Cove in Cornwall, England; and the music festivals ofCharleston, South

Carolina (Spoleto USA), Sarasota, Florida, and Taos, New Mexico, as well as

the Schleswig-Holstein Festival in Germany. An avid chamber musician,

Cho has worked with members ofthe Talcacs, Guarneri, Juilliard, and 

Brentano String Quartets and played in the New York String Seminar at

Carnegie Hall. She holds degrees from the University of Southern California

and the New England Conservatory of Music.

5
SOPHIA KIM-COOK

Born in Montreal, Quebec, pianist Sophia Kirn-Cook began her music

studies at age six at Montreal’s Ecole de musique Vincent d’Indy and quickly 

defined her talent, winning the Canadian Music Competition just one year 

later. She continued to pursue piano studies at the Conservatoire de musique de Quebec, and McGill University. Kim-Cook has won competitions as

a soloist (the McGill Symphony Orchestra Competition) and as an accompanist (the Eckhardt-Gramatte Competition). Having relocated to the United

States with her husband, she is now active in this country, serving as a collaborative pianist for the Eastern Trombone Workshop, the Mid-Atlantic Flute

Competition, the National Gallery ofArt Orchestra, and the Washington

Concert Opera, and performing with members ofthe National Symphony

Orchestra and the United States Army Band. Kim-Cook also teaches classes

in early childhood music at the Levine School of Music.

6

Program Notes

Chester Dale (1883-1962) was an astute businessman who made his fortune

on Wall Street in the bond market. He thrived on forging deals and translated much ofthis energy and talent into collecting art. His magnificent

collection, which he bequeathed to the National Gallery ofArt, is a monument of French painting from the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries. It is the subject of an exhibition currently on view at the Gallery 

that includes such masterpieces as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s Forest of

Fontainebleau (1834), Auguste Renoir’s A Girl with a Watering Can (1876),

Mary Cassatt’s Boating Party (1893/1894), Edouard Manet’s Old Musician

(1862), Pablo Picasso’s Family ofSaltimbanques (1905), and George Bellows’

Blue Morning (1909). Other artists represented include Paul Cezanne, Edgar 

Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, and Claude

Monet. Portraits of Dale by Salvador Dali and Diego Rivera are included in

the show, along with portraits of Dale’s wife Maud (who was an artist in her

own right and greatly influenced her husband’s interest in art) painted by

George Bellows and Fernand Leger.

In honor ofthe exhibition, the members of Virginia Virtuosi have

selected works by composers whose impact on the development ofmusic

can be compared with the impact on the world of art ofthe painters represented in the exhibition. Corot, Gottschalk, and Manet represent the late 

stages ofromanticism in the middle ofthe nineteenth century; Ravel, who 

is sometimes described as an impressionist composer but more accurately

identified as a symbolist, was deeply influenced by the work of Degas, Monet, 

and Renoir; and the paintings of Bellows, Leger, Matisse, Modigliani, and

Picasso find echoes in the music ofthe iconoclast Milhaud and the modernist

Piston. George Gershwin was personally acquainted with Chester Dale and

was inspired by Dale’s collection to collect art himself. Although Gershwin

did not have much time to do so (he died at age 39), he did collect significant works by Thomas Hart Benton and other American painters who were

breaking new ground in the 1930s.

Program notes by Stephen Ackert, head, music department, National

Gallery ofArt
'PwrjMtia 'PwtUo&i

Upcoming Performances

Children's Concert:

The Further Adventures ofPeter and the Wolf

Sunday, June 6, 2010

2:30 pm

The Historic George Washington Hotel

Grand Ballroom

Winchester, Virginia

r\j r\j /\j

Thursday, June 24, 2010

6:00 pm

John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

Millennium Stage

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www.virginiavirtuosi.com

presents

Franco-American Classical Music in the Jazz Age

Music by Gershwin, Gottschalk, Milhaud, and Ravel

Sunday, April 18, 2010

6:30 pm

National Gallery of Art

West Garden Court

Washington, DC

Presented in honor of
Often called the first truly "Pan American" artist,

Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829 - 1869) grew up

in Louisiana and traveled extensively, 

throughout the Caribbean and South America.

He was noted as a piano virtuoso and his

compositions include works for solo piano,

symphony orchestra, and opera. Gottschalk 

effortlessly blended European forms with

American musical language making his musical

voice distinctive, unique, and instantly

recognizable.

The banjo inspired two Gottschalk compositions

for solo piano in the 1850s. An instrument with

African roots, the banjo was first played in North America by enslaved

Africans. It achieved international popularity in the nineteenth century

through its association with minstrelsy, the first musical and theatrical form

recognized by European audiences as distinctively American. Gottschalk 

displayed such an intimate understanding of the mechanics of the banjo

that modern banjo players play his works with very little alteration to the

original score. Musicologist Paul Ely Smith has argued that Gottschalk's The

Banjo is "the most detailed and complete surviving contemporaneous

record of mid-nineteenth century African-American banjo music." The

earlier and less well-known version of The Banjo is presented this evening

arranged for string trio.

Like Gottschalk, French artist Paul Gauguin (1848 - 1903) traveled

extensively, including stays in the Caribbean, Panama, and Tahiti. Gauguin's

style successfully blended traditional European artistic forms like the selfportrait and the female nude with exaggerated body proportions, geometric

designs and stark color contrasts more commonly associated with nonWestern forms. In this sense, both Gottschalk and Gauguin were pioneers 

among late nineteenth century artists in the integration of non-European

artistic influences into traditional European forms.

Gauguin's self-portrait of 1889 was painted during his "synthesis" period. 

Synthesis artists like Paul Gauguin, Emile Berbard and Louis Anquetin strove 

for a balance between (i.e. a synthesis of) form and feeling by capturing the

outward appearance ofthe object with attention to aesthetic

"Self Portrait" Paul Gauguin

considerations like line, balance and emotional expression. Likewise,

Gottschalk's The Banjo is not simply a transcription of nineteenth century

banjo music, but is the composer's attempt to invoke "feeling" of banjo

playing within the structure of classical music form.

More than any other

composer of the early 

twentieth century,

George Gershwin (1898

- 1937) bridged the gap

between "serious music"

and "popular music." He

began his professional 

career in New York at

the age of fifteen as a

song plugger and had his

first major hit as a

composer in 1920 with

Al Jolson's recording of

Swanne. Along with his

contemporaries Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rogers, Gershwin's 

music defined the "Golden Age" of Tin Pan Alley. By the age of thirty,

Gershwin was America's most famous and widely accepted composer of

concert music.

Gershwin's populist approach to composing melded popular song styles and

jazz elements with classical forms. His wildly successful piano concerto

Rhapsody in Blue (billed as "An Experiment in Modern Music") was

premiered by the Paul Whiteman band in 1924 and earned Gershwin both

critical and popular acclaim. Gershwin went on to compose other influential

concert music, including two operas (Porgy and Bess and Blue Monday), a

tone poem (An American in Paris) and another piano concerto (Piano

Concerto in F). Lullaby, composed in 1919 for string quartet, was Gershwin's 

first foray into a traditional classical music genre. The work blends wellcrafted melodies, Latin-tinged rhythms, and a charming approach to string 

timbres.

Gershwin represented a new generation of American composers trained in

America and focused on developing a new American style. Like Gershwin,
American artist George Bellows (1882 - 1925) also developed his craft in the

United States during this same period while living in Manhattan. Associated

with the Ashcan school, Bellows and members of a group called "The Eight"

also incorporated a populist approach in their choice of subjects. Art

historian M. Sue Kendall observed that "shortly after 1900 (these artists) 

began to portray ordinary aspects of city life in their paintings."

Bellows' Blue Morning (1909) bears a strong titular resemblance to

Gershwin's first opera, Blue Monday, and was painted the same year as his

most famous work, Stag at Sharkey's. Both paintings utilize swift

brushstrokes and a gritty, unromanticized perspective on their subjects.

Blue Morning's view of working class New Yorkers at a construction site

framed by the support columns of an elevated train convey Bellows'

interest in the rhythms of daily life in a modern, urban environment.

Both Maurice Ravel's

(1875 - 1937) Mother

Goose Suite and Mary 

Cassatt's (1844 - 1926)

The Boating Party

explore the innocence of

childhood. Ravel based

his musical exploration

on a collection of tales

first collected in the late

seventeenth century by

Charles Perrault and

published as Stories and

Tales of Olden Times,

with Morals. Originally written for piano and later orchestrated, Ravel

himself noted "the idea of evoking in these pieces the poetry of childhood

naturally led me to simplify my style and to refine my means of expression."

Mary Cassatt grew up in Pittsburgh and spent much of her later life working

in France where she exhibited alongside the French Impressionists at the

invitation of Degas. Representations of mothers and children dominated

much of her work during the late nineteenth century, including The Boating

"The Boating Party" Mary Cassatt

Party where an infant lies supine in her mother's arms. The focal point of

the painting is the shaded infant's face, protected by her mother's bonnet.

Both Ravel's treatment of instrumental timbre and Cassatt's use of paint

features color as an expressive tool. In Cassatt's painting, the strong, cool

greens and blues of The Boating Party are balanced by the warmer pink

tones in the infant's clothing. In Mother Goose Suite, Ravel utilizes

ephemeral harmonics in his string writing and non-functional sonorities

colored by the addition and subtraction of different instruments.

French artist, filmmaker, and ceramicist 

Fernand Leger (1881 - 1955)

experimented with many artistic styles

throughout his career, including 

surrealism and cubism. His ideas about

form and art objects were influential

among many prominent twentieth

century artists. Leger's portrait of Maud

Dale (1935) emerged from a period in

Leger's life described by author and

historian Judi Freeman as centered on

the "cult of the object." Freeman

observes

"Leger's fascination with the isolated

object increased in the late 1920s, when

he embarked on a series of drawings and paintings in which single objects,

ranging from a hand to leaves or a bunch of keys, were either seen at close

range or were juxtaposed with other seemingly unrelated objects... In

paintings, objects were rendered flatly, with strong contours and filled-in

colour set against simple decorative planes."

Leger expressed this idea in 1945 stating "the object in modern 

painting must become the main character and overthrow the

subject. If, in turn, the human form becomes an object, it can

considerably liberate possibilities for the modern artist." Leger's

concept was to represent the art subject (in this case, Maud Dale)

as an object only and removed from sentimental symbolism. This

"Maud Dale" Fernand Leger
explains and contextualizes the flat rendering, lack of facial

expression, and strong contrasting lines and colors in the

composition.

Although he occasionally composed programmatic works, 

composer Walter Piston (1894 - 1976) is best known for eschewing

the neo-romantic strain in American classical music and composing 

"absolute music" based upon traditional forms. His deft handling of

fugues, canons, and other aspects of counterpoint are especially

noteworthy. Musicologist Howard Pollack observed, "One can

readily discern in his music an engineer's concern for formal

precision, a painter's care for coloristic detail and a violist's

attention to inner voices."

Written in 1974, a mere two years before his death, Three

Counterpoints showcases musical beauty in its melodic lines, blend

of timbres, and rich counterpoint. "Meaning" cannot be found by

following a superimposed "script" or musical program. Instead, the

composer revels in the pure joy of sound and form. Therefore,

both Piston's Three Counterpoints and Leger's Maud Dale celebrate 

the primacy of pure art (sound or object). Their subjects (art object

and musical themes) do not derive meaning as personal or cultural

symbols but are beautiful in the use of line, form, shape, contrast,

and other characteristics intrinsic to the objects themselves.

(o/iester Q)a/e (oc±//ecfw?t

New York investment broker Chester Dale's 1962 bequest made the

National Gallery of Art one of the leading repositories in North America of

French art of the late-19th and early 20th centuries. From Impressionism 

to Modernism: The Chester Dale Collection, on view in the Gallery's West 

Building from January 31, 2010 through July 31, 2011, will bring together

81 of the finest French and American paintings that Dale and his wife

Maud, an artist and critic, assembled from the 1920s through the 1950s.

The exhibition and its accompanying book will explore the Dales' passion

and talent for acquiring great art. Many of the works in the show are

among the most renowned masterpieces in the history of art, but due to a

stipulation in the bequest, may only be seen at the National Gallery of Art

in Washington, DC.

French-Jewish composer Darius Milhaud (1892 - 1974) was one of a group 

of six modernist French composers (Auric, Durey, Honegger, Poulenc and

Tailleferre were the others) known collectively as Les Six (the six). Striving to

integrate the sounds of everyday life with popular music forms like circus

music and jazz, Les Six was also a reaction to the influence of German

composers, especially Wagner. In 1923, Milhaud penned The Creation of

the World after hearing live jazz music performed in Harlem. This historic

and influential work was among the first to synthesize stylistic elements 

from the jazz and classical traditions. Listeners may hear similarities with

George Gershwin's piano concerto Rhapsody in Blue, but Milhaud's sixmovement ballet suite actually pre-dates Gershwin's composition by a year.

Originally composed for orchestra, Milhaud wrote this unusual arrangement

for strings and piano in 1926.

The Creation of the World was conceived as a ballet based upon Blaise

Cendras' 1920 collection of African 

mythology, Anthologie Negre.

Milhaud worked closely with artist

Fernand Leger (1881 - 1955), who

designed elaborate sets and

costumes for the 1923 production.

In 1939, Milhaud was forced to flee 

France due to the rise of Nazi

Germany and he secured a teaching 

post at Mills College in Oakland,

California in 1940. A year later,

Leger joined him on the faculty of

the all-women's college.

The Chester Dale Collection includes artists central to the development of

Cubism including Fernand Leger, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque (1882 -

1963). In Braque's Still Life: Le Jour (1929), the artist melds multiple

perspectives of various recognizable, common objects. For example, the

newspaper occupying the focal point of the painting faces both the viewer

and angles back along the table. Likewise, Milhaud pioneered the use of

multiple, simultaneous keys into his compositions, a technique called

"polytonality." The audience perceives the pull of a tonal center, but that

pull (i.e. perspective) is often in more than one direction at any given time.

The effect is as if Milhaud's European perspective ofjazz is skewed as if seen

through a kaleidoscope.