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

The Sixty-third Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery ofArt

2,525th Concert

Leila fosefowicz, violinist

John Novacek, pianist

Presented in honor of

Cotton Puffs, Q-tips®, Smoke and Mirrors:

The Drawings ofEd Ruscha

27 February 2005 

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

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

Program

John Adams (b. 1947)

Road Movies (1995)

Relaxed Groove

Meditative 

“40% Swing”

Esa-Pekka Salonen (b. 1958)

Lachen verlemt

For unaccompanied violin

INTERMISSION

Mark Grey (b. 1967)

San Andreas Suite

For unaccompanied violin 

Wonder Years

Clear Lake

Eruption

John Novacelc (b. 1964)

Four Rags

Intoxication

4th Street Drag 

Cockles

Full Stride Ahead
The Musicians

Violinist Leila Josefowicz has won the hearts of audiences around the world

with her fresh approach to the violin repertoire and her dynamic virtuosity.

She first came to national attention in 1994, when she made her Carnegie

Hall debut, performing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with the Academy of

Saint Martin in the Fields, under the direction of Sir Neville Marriner. In that

same year she received the Avery Fisher Career Grant. Since then, she has

performed with many ofthe world’s most prestigious orchestras, including

the Boston and Chicago symphonies, the Cleveland and Philadelphia orchestras, the Los Angeles and London philharmonic orchestras, and the National 

Radio Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo. Among the illustrious conductors with

whom she has worked are Seiji Ozawa, Valery Gergiev, Wolfgang Sawallisch, 

Charles Dutoit, and Franz Welser-Moest.

Leila Josefowicz has appeared frequently on television on such programs

as The Tonight Show, Evening at Pops, Livefrom Lincoln Center; and CBS Sunday Morning, hosted by Eugenia Zukerman. Her recent collaboration with

composer John Adams was broadcast throughout Europe by the BBC.

Both Josefowicz’s debut recording (Tchaikovsky and Sibelius violin concertos with Sir Neville Marriner) and her second CD (works for unaccompanied violin) received the Diapason d’Or prize. Subsequent recordings,

released on the bbc, Nonesuch, Universal, and Philips Classics labels,

have met with great success.

A graduate ofthe Curtis Institute of Music and a former pupil ofJaime

Laredo and Jascha Brodsky, Leila Josefowicz studied chamber music with

Felix Galimir and has collaborated with such renowned musicians as Martha

Argerich, Thomas Hampson, Andras Schiff, Mitsuko Uchida, and Andre

Watts. She appears at the National Gallery by arrangement with Cramer/

Marder Artists of New York City.

4

A top prizewinner in the Leschetizky, Etude Music Club, Carmel

Music Society, Mannes Concerto, and Joanna Hodges International Piano 

Competitions, John Novacek studied piano with Peter Serkin, Bruce

Sutherland, and Jakob Gimpel and chamber music with Jamie Laredo and

Felix Galimir. He regularly tours North and Central America, Europe, Japan,

Korea, and China as both recitalist and concerto soloist and has been heard

in such important venues as the Kennedy Center, Avery Fisher Hall, the 92d

Street Y, Merldn Hall, Weill Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, UCLA’s Royce Hall,

Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, and the Theatre des Champs-Elysees. A frequent guest

at music festivals, he has performed at festivals in Lucerne, Switzerland,

Stavanger, Norway, La Jolla, California, and Seattle, Washington, as well as

at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, WolfTrap, and Ravinia.

A much sought-after collaborative artist, Novacek has played with Yo-Yo

Ma, Joshua Bell, Leila Josefowicz, Emmanuel Pahud, Truls Morlc, Julius 

Baker, the Colorado String Quartet, and Lynn Harrell. He has worked closely

with composers John Adams, George Rochberg, John Williams, John Harbison, Sebastian Currier, and John Zorn. Novacek’s compositions and arrangements have been performed by the Pacific Symphony, the Vienna Chamber

Orchestra, the Fresno Ballet, and the Harrington String Quartet as well as

Millennium, Diana Ross, Kiri Te Kanawa, Ruggiero Raimondi, and the Three

Tenors. Novacek has recorded twenty-five CDs, encompassing solo and

chamber music by most major composers from Bach to Bartok, and many

contemporary and original scores. Titles include Great Mozart Piano Works,

Spanish Rhapsody, Novarags (original ragtime compositions), Classic Romance,

Hungarian Sketches, Intersection, and Romances et Meditations. With Leila

Josefowicz he has recorded Americana and For the End of Time.

5
Cotton Puffs, Q-tips®, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings ofEd Ruscha

Bom in 1937, Ed Ruscha is one of America’s most important and influential

contemporary artists. He is known for his enigmatic paintings, drawings,

and photographs of gasoline stations, apartment buildings, palm trees, and

vacant lots, all familiar sights in Los Angeles, where the artist lives. The first

museum retrospective of Ruscha’s drawings highlights his genius for wry and

deadpan juxtaposition ofwords and objects. Featuring some ninety drawings

from the past four decades, the exhibition includes examples made with

manufactured as well as organic materials, such as gunpowder and vegetable 

stains, applied with equally imaginative tools. The words and phrases that

are often the subject ofthe drawings seem extracted from billboard advertisements or movie dialogues. Ruscha’s straightforward depiction of common

objects has earned him a reputation as a pop artist, yet his interest in and use

oflanguage have aligned him with conceptualism. In honor ofthe exhibition, 

the National Gallery presents two concerts that celebrate the considerable

contribution that performers and composers from Los Angeles have made to 

the nation’s musical life. On February 20, the Bobby Rodriguez Latin Jazz

Quintet played jazz from Los Angeles. In this concert, Leila Josefowicz, who 

was raised in Los Angeles, performs works by composers who have strong

connections with that city.

6

Program Notes

Shortly after completing the score for Road Movies in 1995 on a commission

from the Library of Congress, John Adams wrote:

After years ofstudiously avoiding the chamber music format,

I have suddenly begun to compose for the medium in real

earnest. The 1992 Chamber Symphony was followed by the

string quartet John’s Book ofAlleged Dances, written for Kronos

in 1994, and now comes Road Movies. My music ofthe [1970s

and 1980s] was principally about massed sonorities and the 

physical and emotional potency of big walls oftriadic harmony.

These musical gestures were not really germane to chamber

music with its democratic parceling of roles, transparency, and 

timbral delicacy. Moreover, the challenge of writing melodically,

something that chamber music demands above and beyond

all else, was yet to be solved. Fortunately, a breakthrough in

melodic writing came about during the writing of The Death of

Klinghoffer, an opera whose subject and mood required a whole

new appraisal of my musical language.

The title Road Movies is total whimsy, probably suggested by the

“groove” in the piano part, all ofwhich is required to be played in

a “swing” mode (second and fourth of every group offour notes

are played slightly late). [The third movement] is for four-wheel

drives only, a big perpetual motion machine called 40% Swing.

On modern midi sequencers the desired amount ofswing can be

adjusted with almost ridiculous accuracy. Forty percent provides

a giddy, bouncy ride, somewhere between an Ives ragtime and a

long rideout by the Goodman Orchestra, circa 1939. [This ride]

is very difficult for violin and piano to maintain over the sevenminute stretch, especially in the tricky cross-hand style ofthe

piano part. Relax, and leave the driving to us.

7
One of America’s most prolific and widely recognized contemporary

composers, John Adams was commissioned in 2003 by the Los Angeles

Philharmonic to compose a new work to celebrate the opening ofthe new

Walt Disney Hall, designed by Frank Gehry. For this occasion he composed

The Dharma at Big Sur, a work for electric violin and orchestra inspired

by literary impressions ofthe California landscape by such writers at Jack

Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Henry Miller.

About Lachen verlemt (Laughing Unlearned), music director ofthe Los

Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra Esa-Pekka Salonen writes:

The title is a quotation from the ninth movement of [Arnold]

Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire... .The narrator declares that 

she has unlearned the skill oflaughing and begs Pierrot, the 

“horse-doctor to the soul,” to give it back to her. Lachen verlemt

is essentially a chaconne, which in this case means that there

is a harmonic progression that repeats itselfseveral times. The

harmony remains the same throughout the whole piece; only

the surface, the top layer ofthe music, changes. [The piece]

starts with a lyrical, expressive melody.... Gradually the music 

becomes faster and more frenzied, until it develops an almost 

frantic character, as ifthe imaginary narrator had reached a

state of utter despair. A very short coda closes this mini-drama

peacefully.

Regarding his San Andreas Suite, Mark Grey notes:

[It] is a work written for solo unaccompanied violin in a threemovement, fast-slow-fast form. The title... comes from the

famed seismic San Andreas Fault formation [that extends under]

southern and northern California. Unlike any other place,

the West Coast ofthe United States has been a melting pot for

music and traditions from around the world. The work looks

deep into the current West Coast sound of contemporary music,

ranging from classical [to] jazz, rock, pop, electronic, and world

music.... Wonder Years is a snapshot of myself growing up in

8

Palo Alto, a city centered in the San Francisco Bay area’s Silicon

Valley. It combines minimalist forms with cadenzalike violin

acrobatics.... Clear Lake is the largest natural lake in California,

just north of San Francisco. [It] was created by seismic and volcanic activity. The movement reflects on the influence of Asian

music in northern California. Eruption focuses on the high

energy of pop, jazz, and rock music, which has been the staple

ofsouthern California music for more than half a century. [Its

title alludes to] one ofthe most influential guitarists of our 

time, the Dutch-born virtuoso Eddie van Halen, [leader] ofthe

Los Angeles hard rock band Van Halen. [He] flipped the guitar

world upside-down by means of fast, innovative passage work

with intense grace and beauty. On [the band’s] 1978 debut 

album is a solo unaccompanied guitar work, Eruption, which,

at the time, had guitar players around the world scratching

their heads in wonder and disbelief.

Composer Mark Grey has received commissions from the Kronos 

Quartet, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, California EARunit, and former

Kronos Quartet cellist Joan Jeanrenaud. He was a featured composer

in March 2004 in the tenth annual OtherMinds festival, the largest new

music festival on the West Coast ofthe United States.

John Novacek provides the following commentary on his Four Rags:

Ragtime is a complex hybrid of African-American dance tunes

filtered through the procedures ofthe polka, the march, and

white minstrel song. Classic ragtime flourished from 1895 to

1915, and its greatest exponent was Scott Joplin. Inspired by the

Joplin revival of the 1970s (itselfspurred by the soundtrack to

the film The Sting), I found playing and composing rags habitforming, and the habit persists. My own rags show various

influences: classic ragtime, the classical showpiece, and stride,

the highly embellished, virtuosic offshoot of ragtime practiced

by Harlem pianists James P. Johnson and Fats Waller. Four

Rags is dedicated to Leila Josefowicz.

9
The Sixty-third Season of Concerts

at the National Gallery of Art

Under the direction of Stephen Ackert

March-June 2005

West Building, West Garden Court *

Admission free

Programs subject to change

Detailed information at uww.nga.gov or (202) 842-6941

MARCH

6 Takacs String Quartet

Bartok: Quartets Nos. 3 and 4

Beethoven: Quartet, op. 59, no. 3

Presented in honor of Andre Kertesz

13 National Gallery Chamber

Players Wind Quintet

Music by Antonin Reicha and

other Hungarian composers

Presented in honor of Andre Kertesz

March 20, 27, and April 3, 2005

Concerts in honor ofthe exhibition

Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre

20 L’Orchestre de Chambre Fran^ais

with Kyung Sun Lee, violinist

Ravel: Pavane

Magnard: Suite op. 2

Lekeu: Adagiofor Strings

Debussy: Petite Suite

Saint-Saens: Romance op. 48

27 Philippe Entremont, pianist

Debussy: Selections from

Preludes and Images

Ravel: Sonatine; Gaspard de la nuit

Presented in honor of

Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre

APRIL

3 Rosa Lamoreaux, soprano

Betty Bullock, pianist

French cabaret concert

April 10, 17, 24, and May 1, 2005

Concerts in honor ofthe exhibition

Gilbert Stuart

10 Christ Church Cathedral Choir,

Oxford, England

Music by Attwood, Crotch, Billings,

and other British and American

composers of Stuart’s time

17 National Gallery Orchestra

Stephen Simon, guest conductor

Music by Haydn, Boyce, and other

composers of Stuart’s time

24 Penelope Crawford, fortepianist

Stephen Ackert, organist

Music of Stuart’s time for fortepiano,

harpsichord, and organ

* unless otherwise indicated

MAY JUNE

1 Dean Shostak, glass armonicist

Music for glass armonica and other

instruments from Stuart’s time

8 The Baltimore Consort

The World ofJacob van Eyck:

Seventeenth-Century Music and

Musical Instruments ofthe

Netherlands Presented in honor ofJan 

de Bray and the Classical Tradition

15 The St. Petersburg String Quartet

Music by Mendelssohn, Shostakovich,

and Smetana

22 The Monty Alexander Trio

Jazz concert

(East Building Auditorium)

29 No concert

5 National Gallery Orchestra

Emil de Cou, guest conductor

Music by Beethoven, Debussy, and

Doppler

12 Carlos Cesar Rodriguez, pianist

Music by Guastavino, Bartok, Ravel,

Albeniz, and Debussy

19 The National Gallery Chamber

Players String Quartet

Quartets by Mozart, Kivrak, and Dvorak

26 National Gallery Vocal Arts Ensemble

Renaissance a cappella choral music