74TH SEASON 

OF CONCERTS

NOVEMBER 8, 2015 • NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
Photo by William Hartounian

PROGRAM

3:30 • West Building, West Garden Court

David Hardy, cellist

Lisa Emenheiser, pianist

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)

Sonata in C Major for Cello and Piano, op. 65 (1961)

Dialogo

Scherzo-pizzicato

Elegia

Marcia

Moto perpetuo

Intermission

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)

Sonata in G Minor for Cello and Piano, op. 19 (1901)

Lento; Allegro moderato

Allegro scherzando

Andante

Allegro mosso
The Musicians

David Hardy, principal cellist of the National Symphony Orchestra, achieved international

recognition in 1982 as the top American prizewinner at the Seventh International Tchaikovsky

Cello Competition in Moscow. Hardy won a special prize for the best performance of the Suite

for Solo Cello by Victoria Yagling, commissioned for the competition.

Hardy made his solo debut with the National Symphony Orchestra in 1986, with

Mstislav Rostropovich conducting. As a regular soloist with the orchestra, he gave the world

premiere performance of Stephen Jaffe's Concerto for Cello and Orchestra in 2004, with Leonard

Slatkin conducting. In 2008, Bridge Records released the premiere recording of the concerto

with Hardy and the Odense Symphony of Denmark. The National Symphony Orchestra's 

recording of John Corigliano's Symphony no. 1, featuring Hardy's solo cello performance, won 

the 1996 Grammy Award for "Best Classical Album."

Hardy is a founding member of the Kennedy Center Chamber Players and has

appeared with this ensemble before enthusiastic audiences in the Kennedy Center's

Terrace Theater since 2003. Hardy's many chamber music performances include regular

appearances at the Strings Music Festival in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and The

Halcyon Music Festival in New Hampshire. He is a founding member of the Opus 3 Trio,

with violinist Charles Wetherbee and pianist Lisa Emenheiser. The Opus 3 Trio has

performed to critical acclaim across the country and has commissioned, premiered, and

recorded many new works. Additionally, Hardy was cellist of the 20th Century Consort

in Washington, DC, where he premiered works by Stephen Albert and Nicholas Maw. In

addition to his performing schedule, Hardy teaches at the Peabody Conservatory of Music

in Baltimore, Maryland.

Lisa Emenheiser, pianist, is one of Washington, DC's most respected performing

artists and has performed with the National Symphony Orchestra for twenty-five years.

A graduate of the Juilliard School, where she earned bachelor's and master's degrees in

music, she has performed at Alice Tully Hall, Avery Fischer Hall, and Carnegie Recital Hall

in New York, and at the National Gallery of Art, the Phillips Collection, the Smithsonian

Institution, and the Kennedy Center in Washington. Emenheiser has appeared as soloist

with renowned orchestras and was one of the featured soloists at the Kennedy Center's 

Piano 2000 Festival. She was also a soloist for the Kennedy Center's Journey to America

Festival, and the National Symphony's Composer Portrait: Mozart. She has performed

under the world's leading conductors — maestros Eschenbach, Rostropovich, Solti, and

Slatkin. An established international chamber musician, she also has performed with

some of the world's finest soloists, including Philipe Quint, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, 

Julius Baker, Eugenia Zukerman, Ransom Wilson, and Jean-Pierre Rampal.

Emenheiser is an avid performer of contemporary music. She is pianist for the 21st

Century Consort in Washington, DC, where she has premiered works by Stephen Albert,

Nicholas Maw, Eugene O'Brien, David Froom, and Donald Crockett. She is a founding

member of Opus 3 Trio, along with violinist Charles Wetherbee and cellist David Hardy.

Additionally, Emenheiser was featured on national television as an expert artist commentator and performer in the PBS documentary Exploring Your Brain, in which she performed

Ginastera's Piano Sonata no. 7 and discussed the topic of memory with Garrick Utley.

4 • National Gallery of Art

Program Notes

It has been said that Britten's purely instrumental music suffers in comparison to his

remarkable stage works —that, while ingenious in craft, the instrumental works lack both

inspiration and expressive sweep. Britten himself seems to have succumbed to such

criticism during the mid-i940s and early 1950s, immediately after the widespread success

of Peter Grimes (1944-1945) and his first few chamber operas. Ultimately, it was the

composer's friendship with Mstislav Rostropovich that compelled him to reenter the realm 

of instrumental composition with a series of works written especially for the Soviet cellist.

The Sonata for Cello and Piano is the first of several works Britten wrote with Rostropovich in

mind. In its five short movements, Britten finds an effective way to couple the venerable 

tradition of classical form, the exploration of which he had seemingly abandoned after the

1930s, and his own naturally narrative voice; here, dramatic description and purely musical 

device reign hand in hand.

Britten follows a four-movement classical sonata blueprint quite closely, and the

simple insertion of an "extra” movement (the Marcia) should not distract the listener from

his otherwise formal approach. Britten describes the work as being "in C"; while this is apt

enough, the work is unmistakably marked by the composer's usual chromatic excursions

and sharp tonal deflections.

Britten reveals his most intimate musical voice at the opening of the Dialogo

movement. The cello offers gently fractured musings on a series of whole-step and halfstep gestures, while the piano fills the rhythmic spaces left open by the cello with sonorous, 

rising parallel thirds. Almost all the basic material of the entire sonata derives from this

seemingly unpretentious passage. After the central development section, the meter shifts

to 4/4 as the cello takes over the scalar-motion motivic material of the piano's opening. 

Intermittent pedal tones on C crop up to herald a recapitulation. The piano scales, now

spread throughout the upper register, and glistening cello harmonics, bring the movement

to a quiet close.

The character of the second movement, Scherzo-pizzicato, is just as the title indicates: 

a recasting of the basic intervallic substance from the first movement into a rapid-fire scherzo,

during which the cellist never makes use of the bow. Not surprisingly, a percussive quality

is prominent throughout. The parallel thirds return, now chromatically modified, to form the 

oscillating piano backdrop of the Elegia, while the grotesquely bitonal Marcia takes off on

scalar motives that employ the same alternating half steps and whole steps first heard in the

opening of the Dialogo. The Moto perpetuo finale is cast in a kind of abstract rondo form

whose saltando cello articulations are chased around a chromatic wilderness by the piano

until, at last, C major appears as if in benediction.

74th Season • 5
The common wisdom on Rachmaninov's Sonata for Cello and Piano is that it is really 

a piano sonata with cello accompaniment. While this assessment may be a slight exaggeration, it cannot be denied that the piano is the dominant instrument in the work. The

composer dedicated this sonata to his dear friend, cellist Anatoly Brandukov. They gave the

premiere performance together in Moscow in November 1901. Set in four movements, the 

sonata is filled with the Russian romantic character that imbues Rachmaninov's beloved

piano concertos. This would turn out to be the composer's last chamber music composition,

as the remainder of his career was focused on solo piano and larger-scale orchestral and

choral pieces.

A slow introduction opens the first movement, marked Lento; Allegro moderato. The

tempo picks up and the cello presents a passionate, beautiful theme. A slower, somewhat

more wistful melody follows, after which comes the stormy development section. The reprise

ensues and the movement ends in typical Rachmaninovian fashion: the tempo speeds up

as thematic morsels appear in a race to the finish, the piano crowning the coda with three 

resolute chords. In the second movement, marked Allegro scherzando, the cello presents a

rhythmic idea in the opening moments of marginal interest. Two other themes are also

presented, the latter of which is quite beautiful and recalls the mood of much of the slow 

music in the second and third Piano Concertos, especially in the piano writing.

The third movement, marked Andante, begins on the piano with a lovely theme of

intimate and passionate character. After the cello enters, the material expands much the 

way the melody does in the second movement of the second Piano Concerto. A powerful

climax is reached, and the third movement ends softly.

The finale starts off with a robust theme on the cello that rather lacks the individual

stamp of the composer. Still, the music is bright and vivacious and has strong appeal. There

follows a second subject more in the Rachmaninovian vein, full of passion and beauty and

seeming to soar to the heavens. The two themes reappear throughout, the composer deftly

manipulating their interplay. In the beginning of the coda, the cello recalls the piano's 

opening (six-note) theme from the first movement, and then the work ends brilliantly.

Program Notes taken from descriptions on allmusic.com by

James Manheim and Robert Cummings.

6 * National Gallery of Art

Upcoming events of the SeventyFourth Season of The William

Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot

Belin Concerts

United States Army Chorus

Songs of the Soldier: A Salute to Veterans

Veteran's Day concert

November n, Wednesday, 12:10

West Building, West Garden Court

National Gallery of Art Wind Quintet

Music by French composers

Presented in honor of

Louise Bourgeois: No Exit.

November 15, Sunday, 3:30

West Building, West Garden Court

National Gallery of Art

New Music Ensemble

Music by Morton Subotnick

Presented in honor of

The Serial Impulse at Gemini G.E.L.

November 22, Sunday, 3:30

West Building, West Garden Court

National Gallery of Art Orchestra

Gillian Anderson, guest conductor

Cine-concert featuring Way Down East

Copresented with the Department of Film

November 29, Sunday, 2:00

East Building Auditorium

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.

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The department of music produced these

program notes. Copyright © 2015 Board of

Trustees, National Gallery ofArt, Washington

Cover Heinrich von Forster, The Music Room

of Archduchess Margarete, Princess of Saxony,

in Schloss Ambras (detail), 1870s, National

Gallery of Art, Washington

Back cover West Building, East Garden Court,

National Gallery of Art, Gallery Archives

© Dennis Brack/Black Star