The Sixty-third Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery of Art

2,512th Concert

Music Department

National Gallery of Art

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue nw

Washington, dc

Mailing address

2000B South Club Drive

Landover, md 20785

Ariana Barkeshli, pianist

Presented in honor of the exhibition

Palace and Mosque:

Islamic Artfrom the Victoria and Albert Museum

21 November 2004

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

iviviv.ngfl.gov

Admission free
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 concerts now begin at 6:30 pm.

Late entry or reentry after 6:30 pm is not permitted.

2,512th Concert

21 November 2004, 6:30 pm

Alireza Mashayekhi (b. 1940)

A la recherche du temps perdu, Op. in

Washington premiere performance

Letters for Piano, Op. no

Aminollah Hossein (1905-1983)

Legende persane, Op. 35, No. 1 (1950)

Washington premiere performance

Prelude No. 1 (Hommage a Omar Khayam) (1951)

Washington premiere peformance

Golnoush Khaleghi (b. 1941)

In Exile (1986)

Memories (1987, revised 2004)

Washington premiere performance

Intermission

Modest Mussorgsky' (1839-1881)

Pictures at an Exhibition (1874)

Promenade

Gnomus

Promenade

11 vecchio castello

Promenade

Tuileries

Bydlo

Promenade

Ballet ofthe Chicks in Their Shells 

Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle

Promenade

The Market Place at Limoges (Great News!)

Catacombae (Sepulcrum romanum)

Con Mortius in lingua morta

The Hut on Fowl’s Legs (Baba Yaga)

The Great Gate of Kiev
Palace and Mosque: Islamic Art from 

the Victoria atid Albert Museum

Assembled over the past 150 years, the Islamic art collection of the Victoria

and Albert Museum (V&A) in London is one ofthe most renowned in the 

world. The closing ofthe V&A’s Islamic galleries for renovation provides a

unique opportunity for museumgoers in other parts ofthe world to see an 

exhibition that highlights the breadth and depth ofthis extraordinary collection. Selected from approximately ten thousand objects, Palace and Mosque

conveys the richness and complexity of Islamic art through more than one

hundred works that represent the full range ofthe decorative arts, including

ceramics, textiles, carpets, ivories, glass, metalwork, and woodwork.

The exhibition is organized in thematic sections, “The Written Word,”

“Courts and Courtiers,” “Mosques, Shrines, and Churches,” and “Artistic

Exchange.” The section devoted to “Artistic Exchange” presents works

created by Islamic, European, and Asian artisans that demonstrate the central role ofthe Middle East in the exchange of artistic and cultural ideas

between East and West. The exhibition was organized by the Victoria and 

Albert Museum, London, in association with the National Gallery of Art,

Washington, and is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on

the Arts and the Humanities. Its presence at the National Gallery of Art is

generously sponsored by H.R.H. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Ambassador

of Saudi Arabia to the United States. The international tour ofthe exhibition has been made possible by the generosity of Mohammad Jameel, the

benefactor ofthe V&A’s Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art, which is dedicated to

the memory of Mr. Abdul LatifJameel, the late founder ofthe Abdul Latif

Jameel Group, and his wife Nafisia. The exhibition remains on view in the

East Building until February 6, 2005.

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The Musician

A native ofTehran, Iran, Ariana Barkeshli received her first music lessons

from her father, Mehdi Barkeshli. At age fifteen, she went to France to

continue her musical studies with Yvonne Loriod at the Paris Conservatory

Foreign Division and played her debut recital at the Salle Cortot in Paris.

Barkeshli also studied under Germaine Mounier at both the Amiens Conservatory and l’Ecole Normale de Musique, from which she received the

master of music degree. Since 1985 Barkeshli has lived in upstate New

York, where she teaches at the Dutchess Community College Music School

and performs numerous recitals. She continued her education at the State

University of New York in New Paltz, earning the master of arts degree 

in music therapy and studying applied piano under the renowned pianist

Vladimir Feltsman.

Ariana Barkeshli dedicates her performance to the memory oftwo

pioneers oftwentieth-century Persian music, Mehdi Barkeshli and Rouhollah Khaleghi, both ofwhom profoundly influenced the Persian composers whose works are represented in this program. Professor Barkeshli

(1912-1987) was one ofthe first Persian scholars to earn two doctorates

from European universities. During his forty-year career as a teacher in Iran,

Mehdi Barkeshli not only taught physics but also founded departments of

music and theater at both the University ofTehran and Farabi University. For

his work in measuring mathematically the intervals in the traditional Persian

musical scales, he was awarded the honorary degree doctorate d’etat.

Rouhollah Khaleghi (1906-1965) was born to a musically inclined family in Kerman, Iran. From an early age, he applied himself eagerly to both 

Eastern and Western musical traditions, learning to play the tar and the

violin. He earned a degree in Persian language and literature from Tehran

University, but the only higher music education that was available to him

5
was a correspondence course from a university in Paris. This largely selftaught musician went on to become the most significant Persian composer

ofthe twentieth century. He also founded the National Music Society and

the National School of Music in Tehran.

Program Notes

Alireza Mashayekhi’s first music teachers in Iran were Lotfollah Mofakham

Payman, Hossein Nasehi, and Ophelia Kombadjian, with whom he studied

Persian music, composition, and piano, respectively. Mashayekhi continued 

his music studies in Vienna and Utrecht, where the course ofstudy included 

electronic and computer music. His compositions reflect the two directions of

his training. His Symphony No. 5 is directly inspired by Persian music. His

Symphony No. 6, on the other hand, is not related to Persian music and fits the 

category ofmodem music as it developed in Europe and the United States.

Aminollah Hossein was a composer who also played the tar. He learned

the essentials ofmusic from his mother and continued his studies at the

Petrograd Conservatory in Russia and the Paris Conservatory. In addition to

Legende persane, Hossein’s works include Persian Rhapsody, Humoresque, a

symphonic poem entitled Rubayat Hakim Omar Khayyam, and numerous

folk dances for the piano. His works for orchestra received several performances in Paris in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

A resident ofthe Washington, D.C., area since 1979, Golnoush

Khaleghi is a prominent figure in Persian music and culture in the United 

States. A composer and piano teacher, she also arranges works of her father,

Rouhollah Khaleghi, and other great masters of Persian music. Golnoush

Khaleghi is a graduate of Tehran’s National School of Music, where she 

studied Persian music and piano with Javad Ma’rufi and Hossein Saba. She

subsequently entered the Tehran Conservatory, where she continued her

6

piano studies with Imanuel Melik-Aslanian, and spent three years at the 

Mozarteum Academy in Salzburg. Khaleghi earned degrees in conducting

from Oberlin College and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and

worked closely with such renowned conductors as Helmuth Rilling, Robert

Fountain, Karol Teutsch, and Rouben Gregorian. She is the founder of

Hamavazan (the Iranian Radio and Television Choir), the Rouhollah

Khaleghi Orchestra, and the Rouhollah Khaleghi Artistic Center.

In Exile was inspired by a folk song called Dokhtar-e Boyerahmadi (The

Girlfrom Boyerahmad). The lyrics describe a girl from a village near Shiraz,

whose name is not known to the poet. When Golnoush Khaleghi wrote this

work in 1985, she was feeling the anguish offorced exile, rootlessness,

and loss ofidentity, as were many ofthe Persians who were forced to leave

their homeland after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The melody that inspired

Khaleghi’s Fantaisie was written in the 1930s by Morteza Neydavoud as

a pishdaramad, or prelude, and is widely recognized in Iran. After presenting certain parts of Neydavoud’s melody, the Fantaisie turns to a melismatic

section that explores various elements ofthe traditional Persian mode

Esfahan. A development follows, and the work ends with a vigorous recapitulation ofthe original melody.

Deeply moved by the death of his friend, the stage designer, artist, 

and architect Victor Hartmann, Modest Mussorgsky wrote Pictures at an

Exhibition in just one month. Having visited a memorial exhibition of

Hartmann’s paintings, the composer gave a musical impression ofthe

various scenes. At certain points he inserted a recurring passage, which 

he called a promenade, to suggest the movement of a visitor from one 

gallery of an exhibition to another. Several composers saw fit to arrange

the work for orchestra, but it was the orchestration of Maurice Ravel in

1922 that caught the attention of many conductors and propelled Pictures

at an Exhibition into the international spotlight.