Upcoming Events of the Seventy- General Information

Fifth Season of The William

Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot

Belin Concerts

Eliot Fisk, guitar

Complete Cello Suites of J. S. Bach

November 26 and 27, 3:00

West Building, West Garden Court

Donal Fox, piano 

Presented in honor of

Stuart Davis: In Full Swing

December 3,12:30, 2:00, and 3:30

West Building, Gallery M78

Fox Wolf Duo

Virtuosos in Dialogue

December 4, 3:30

West Building, West Garden Court

Tempesta di Mare

Winter: A Cozy Noel

December 11, 4:00

West Building, West Garden Court

Danu

A Christmas Gathering: Feile Na Nollag

December 18, 2:00 and 4:00

West Building, West Garden Court

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.

www.nga.gov

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The department of music produced these

program notes. Copyright © 2016 Board of

Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Cover Ladislas Marcoussis, Les Clefs des Songes

(The Key to Dreams) (detail), 1946, National

Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Estate

of Moses and Ruth Helen Lasky, San Francisco,

Harlan B. and Marshall R. Levine, Trustees

Back cover West Building, Constitution

Avenue entrance, viewed from Sixth Street nw,

1941, National Gallery of Art, Washington,

Gallery Archives

75TH SEASON

OF CONCERTS

NOVEMBER 20, 2016 • NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
PROGRAM

3:30 • West Building, West Garden Court

A Far Cry

David Krakauer, clarinet

Dreams and Prayers

Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179)

0 ignis spiritus paracliti

Osvaldo Golijov (b. 1960)

Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind

Prelude: Calmo, Sospeso

Agitato

Teneramente 

Calmo, Sospeso

Postlude: Lento

Intermission

Mehmet Ali Sanlikol (b. 1974)

Vecd

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

"Heiliger Dankgesang," from String Quartet no. 15, op. 132

2 • National Gallery of Art

The Musicians

A Far Cry

A Far Cry stands at the forefront of an exciting new generation in classical music. According

to the New York Times, the self-conducted orchestra "brims with personality or, better, 

personalities, many and varied." A Far Cry was founded in 2007 by a tightly knit collective

of seventeen young professional musicians, and since the beginning has fostered those

personalities. A Far Cry has developed an innovative process where decisions are made

collectively and leadership rotates among the "Criers." For each piece, the members

elect a group of principals, and these five musicians guide the rehearsal process and shape

the interpretation.

A Far Cry's omnivorous approach has led the group to collaborations with artists

such as Yo-Yo Ma, Jake Shimabukuro, Urbanity Dance, and Roomful of Teeth. By expanding

the boundaries of orchestral repertoire and experimenting with the ways music is prepared, 

performed, and experienced, A Far Cry has been heard and embraced throughout the world

through live performances and the Internet. In 2014, A Far Cry launched its in-house label,

Crier Records, with the album Dreams and Prayers, which received a Grammy nomination. A

second release, Law of Mosaics, followed that same year and has also garnered much critical

attention, including many 2014 Top-10 lists, notably from New Yorker music critic Alex Ross.

Also, WQXR's Q2 Music named A Far Cry as one of the "Imagination-Grabbing, Trailblazing

Artists of 2014."

The eighteen Criers are proud to call Boston home, and maintain strong roots in the

city, rehearsing at their storefront music center in Jamaica Plain and fulfilling the role of 

Chamber Orchestra in Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Working with

local students through an educational partnership with the New England Conservatory, A Far

Cry aims to pass on the spirit of collaboratively empowered music to the next generation.

Violin

Annie Rabbat

Alex Fortes

Jae Cosmos Lee

Jesse Irons

Megumi Stohs Lewis

Miki-Sophia Cloud 

Omar Chen Guey

Robyn Bollinger 

Zenas Hsu

Viola

Dana Kelley

Jason Fisher

Molly Carr

Rimbo Wong

Cello

Alastair Eng

Karen Ouzounian

Loewi Lin

Bass

Erik Higgins 

Kris Saebo

75th Season • 3
David Krakauer

Internationally acclaimed clarinetist David Krakauer redefines the notion of a concert artist.

Known for his mastery of myriad styles, he occupies the unique position of being

one of the world's leading exponents of Eastern European Jewish klezmer music, and at 

the same time is a major voice in classical music. He has appeared with the Tokyo, Kronos,

and Emerson quartets, plus as soloist with the Dresden, Seattle, and Detroit symphony

orchestras, among many others. With his band Ancestral Groove, he has redefined the

klezmer genre with major appearances at Carnegie Hall and international venues. His

discography contains some of the most important klezmer recordings of the past decade,

notably The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind.

Krakauer has enjoyed major ongoing artistic collaborations with diverse performers

and composers, including Dawn Upshaw, Itzhak Perlman, John Zorn, Fred Wesley, Music

from Marlboro, Abraham Inc., Osvaldo Golijov, the Klezmatics, John Cage, Danny Elfman,

and Socalled. In his latest project, The Big Picture, he explores the universal search for

identity through a reimagination of familiar themes by renowned film music composers

brought together in a cinematic concert accompanied by original visuals. An avid educator, 

Krakauer has enjoyed a long relationship with Mannes (New School University), the

Manhattan School of Music, NYU, and the Bard Conservatory.

4 • National Gallery of Art

Program Notes

O ignis spiritus paracliti

From the age of five, Hildegard von Bingen saw gloriously vivid visions, but it wasn't until

the age of forty-three that she began documenting them, then channeling their ecstatic

energy into music. By that time, Hildegard was abbess at the Benedictine monastery

Disibodenberg, her physical and spiritual home from the age of eight, her family having 

dedicated her to the service of the church.

Monastic life builds a daily rhythm around the Divine Offices: services taking place

at designated hours. Sequences (from the Latin, sequentia, "following'') were elaborations

of sacred texts. Originally, the last syllable of "Alleluia" was simply melodically prolonged,

like a wordless ribbon extending, twisting, and trailing, in order to accompany lengthy

processionals. Eventually poetic text pertaining to the service was added with specific

accompanying melodies, and sequences proliferated into the thousands. (Later this was

trimmed down to a handful of approved sequences, one of which — the Dies Irae from the 

Requiem Mass —is well known to many classical concertgoers.)

What is striking about this sequence, and indeed all of Hildegard's music, is how 

elaborate it is in relation to most of the Gregorian chant being sung during her time — sheer

artistic expression marrying form and function. Her music is often noted for its angular yet

soaring lines crafted from breathless intervallic leaps. Her persistent, lifelong visions were

often centered on earthly elements of fire, water, and wind, and the texts to her compositions

are preoccupied with expressing the spiritual through nature imagery — particularly the Holy 

Spirit as represented by the blazing light of flames.

0 ignis spiritus paracliti, written to honor the Holy Spirit, begins with the following text:

0 spirit of fire, bringer of comfort,

Life of the life of every creature,

You are holy, giving life to forms.

You are holy

annointing those perilously broken;

you are holy,

cleansing foul wounds.

0 breath of holiness,

0 fire of love,

0 sweet savor in our breasts,

infusing hearts with the scent of virtue

Program notes by Kathryn Bacasmot

75th Season • 5
Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind

Eight centuries ago, Isaac the Blind —the great kabbalist rabbi of Provence dictated a

manuscript in which he asserted that all things and events in the universe are products of 

combinations of the Hebrew alphabet's letters: "Their root is in a name, for the letters are

like branches, which appear in the manner of flickering flames, mobile, and nevertheless

linked to the coal."

Isaac's lifelong devotion to his art is as striking as that of string quartets and klezmer 

musicians. In these artists' search for something that arises from tangible elements but 

transcends them, they reach a state of communion. The movements of this work sound to me

as if written in three of the different languages spoken by the Jewish people from the earliest 

times. This somehow reflects the composition's epic nature. I hear the prelude and the first

movement, the most ancient, in Aramaic; the second movement is in Yiddish, the rich and

fragile language of a long exile; the third movement and postlude are in sacred Hebrew.

The prelude and the first movement simultaneously explore two prayers in different

ways: The quartet plays the first part of the central prayer of the High Holidays, "We will

observe the mighty holiness of this day..." while the clarinet dreams the motifs from Our 

Father, Our King." The second movement is based on "The Old Klezmer Band," a traditional

dance tune, which is surrounded here by contrasting manifestations of its own halo. The third

movement was written before all the others. It is an instrumental version of K Vakarat, a

work that I wrote a few years ago for Kronos and Cantor Misha Alexandrovich. The meaning 

of the word klezmer, "instrument of song," becomes clear when one hears David Krakauer s

interpretation of the cantor's line. This movement, together with the postlude, bring to

conclusion the prayer left open in the first movement: "Thou pass and record, count and visit, 

every living soul, appointing the measure of every creature's life and decreeing its destiny.

But blindness is as important in this work as dreaming and praying. I had always 

the intuition that, in order to achieve the highest possible intensity in a performance,

musicians should play, metaphorically speaking, "blind." That is why, I think, all legendary 

bards in cultures around the world, starting with Homer, are said to be blind. Blindness is

probably the secret of great string quartets, those who don't need their eyes to communicate among themselves, with the music or the audience. My homage to all of them and

Isaac of Provence is this work for blind musicians, so they can play it by heart. Blindness,

then, reminded me of how to compose music as it was in the beginning: an art that springs

from and relies on our ability to sing and hear, with the power to build castles of sound in

our memories. Program notes by Osvaldo Golijov

Vecd

Vecd (wajd in Arabic) refers to a state of rapture or ecstasy. In Islamic mysticism, Sufi

dervishes would try to attain the state of vecd during their ceremonies in which music played

a central role. Since vecd is the essence of Sufi ceremonies, in this composition I have tried

to capture the essence of several different kinds of Turkish Sufi ceremonies. When doing 

this, I refrained from incorporating the sophisticated modal characteristics (or the so-called 

"microtones") of Turkish Sufi and Ottoman/Turkish classical music since this piece was being

6 • National Gallery of Art

composed for a Western string orchestra. Instead, I decided to base the composition on zikir,

the practice of singing repeated rhythmic phrases by Sufi dervishes. Typically, Turkish Sufi

ceremonies would feature one ostinato in a simpler meter and would speed this ostinato

up throughout the course of five to ten minutes, if not more. During its speeding up, often a

hafiz (Koranic chanter) would improvise on top of the ostinato using devotional poetry. In

this composition, instead of using a single ostinato in a simple meter, I used multiple rhythmic cycles ranging from sixteen beats per measure to four beats per measure. The melodic

phrases that develop throughout the piece replace improvisation, and these phrases together

with the ostinati resemble another kind of Turkish Sufi ceremony: the Serna ceremony of the

Mevlevi (whirling) dervishes. Program notes by Mehmet AH Sanlikol

"Heiliger Dankgesang," from String Quartet no. 15, op. 132

Beethoven's "Holy Song of Thanks by a Convalescent to the Divinity, in the Lydian Mode"

(Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart) is the expansive 

middle movement of String Quartet no. 15, op. 132, completed in 1825 as part of the so-called

Galitzen Quartets (including opuses 127 and 130), after their commissioner Prince Nikolas 

Galitzen. Proportionally, it is nearly the length of the first two movements combined and is

twice as long as the two movements following. Structurally, it is divided into five distinct

parts (perhaps a microcosmic reflection of the quartet's five movements), alternating three

hymn-like "holy song of thanks" ("Heiliger Dankgesang") sections with the shimmering

melodic lightness of two "feeling new strength" ("Neue Kraft fuhlend'') sections, forming

a set of double variations as each repeats with increasing elaboration. Emotionally, the

thanks expressed likely refers to Beethoven's recovery from an abdominal illness; perhaps,

as Maynard Solomon suggests, also paying tribute to the healing powers of music on a

beleaguered spirit. After all, in times of celebration or distress, we inevitably turn to music.

The "Heiliger Dankgesang" commences reverently in the old Lydian church mode,

which, according to Renaissance music theorist Gioseffo Zarlino, "is a remedy for fatigue

of the soul, and similarly for that of the body." The first iteration achieves a floating, otherworldly quality through gently consonant harmonies. Then, with three declamatory unisons 

that grasp the listener as if to say, "Pay special attention here!" the work shifts into D major

for the first of the two "Neue Kraft fuhlend” sections. Beethoven uses trills as a kind of

asterisk noting an important shift, and here, the first violin trembles with the onset of joy.

Each subsequent restatement of the "Heiliger Dankgesang" and "Neue Kraft fuhlend" gains 

confidence, strength, and resolve: passion, via dissonance and resolution, infuses the

"Heiliger Dankgesang," whilst the intervallic jumps and the violins' increasingly intricate

interweaving instill the second "Neue Kraft fuhlend" with enhanced exuberance. The work

concludes with a pledge to go forward with conviction and purpose, buoyed by spiritual

and physical renewal. Program notes by Kathryn Bacasmot

75th Season • 7