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: Felicien Rops, Gaspard de la Nuit (detail), 1868,

National Gallery ofArt, Washington, Rosenwald Collection

The Sixty-eighth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell

and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery of Art

2,735th Concert

Poulenc Trio

Vladimir Lande, oboist

Bryan Young, bassoonist

Irina Kaplan Lande, pianist

with

Hyunah Yu, soprano

September 27, 2009

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Admissionfree
Program

Performed without intermission

Henri Duparc (1848-1933)

Extase (Jean Lahor) (1884)

Soupir (Sully Prudhomme) (1869)

Chanson triste (Jean Lahor) (1868)

Vincent d’Indy (1851-1931)

Trio, op. 29 (1887)

Chant Elegiaque

Finale

Gabriel Faure (1845-1924)

Clair de lune (Paul Verlaine)(1887)

Le Secret (Armand Silvestre) (1881)

Apres an reve (Romain Bussine) (1877)

Les Roses d’lspahan (Leconte de Lisle) (1884)

Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-1894)

LTnvitation au voyage (Charles Baudelaire) (1870)

The Musicians

POULENC TRIO

The Poulenc Trio is comprised ofthree gifted virtuosi—oboist Vladimir 

Lande, bassoonist Bryan Young, and pianist Irina Kaplan Lande. The

unusual combination oftheir respective instruments introduces audiences 

to a unique palate ofsonorities. One of a select few professional wind trios,

the Poulenc Trio is committed to expanding the repertoire through the 

transcription of old masterpieces and the creation of new works. Quoting

a recent review in The Washington Post: “[The Poulenc Trio] does its namesake proud... an intriguing and beautifully played program... convincing 

elegance, near effortless lightness and grace.” A profile for Russian television called the ensemble “virtuosos of classical and contemporary chamber

music.” The Trio also garnered positive attention in recent full-length 

profiles in Chamber Music Magazine and The Double Reed Journal.

The Trio was recently featured at Italy’s Ravello Festival, where it premiered new works by Italian composer Gaetano Panariello and RussianAmerican composer Igor Raykhelson. In recent seasons the ensemble has 

appeared with violinist Hilary Hahn and has toured the Caribbean Islands, 

Russia, and the United States.

The Poulenc Trio maintains a special relationship with museums,

continuing a project it initiated in 2004, “Music at the Museum.” In

addition to two previous concerts at the National Gallery, the Trio has 

created and presented special program for the Hermitage State Museum

in Saint Petersburg, Russia; the Walters Museum in Baltimore, Maryland;

and the Jean Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick, New

Jersey. This innovative series, which links musical and historical themes to

current exhibitions, features the Trio in performances with guest artists,

local celebrities, and expert lecturers. Guest artists have included clarinetist

Alexander Fiterstein, the Jacques Thibaud Trio, and the National Gallery of

Art String Quartet. Further information about the Poulenc Trio is available

at www.poulenctrio.com.

3
HYUNAH YU

Soprano Hyunah Yu holds bachelor and master ofmusic degrees and an artist

diploma from the Peabody Conservatory ofthe Johns Hopkins University. She

was a prize winner in the 1999 Naumburg International Competition, a finalist

in the Dutch International Vocal Competition, and a finalist in the Concert

Artists Guild International Competition. In 2003 Yu won the Borletti-Buitoni 

Trust Award, having been nominated by the eminent pianist Mitsuko Uchida. 

Since 2000 Yu has been a regular performer at the Marlboro Music Festival,

and a frequent recitalist, chamber musician, and soloist with the Aspen Music 

Festival, the Boston Baroque, the Bournemouth Symphony, Concerto Koln, the

Milwaukee Symphony, Musicians from Marlboro, the Orchestra ofthe West

Deutsche Rundfunk, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, the Rotterdam

Philharmonic, the Salzburg Camerata, the Seattle Symphony, the Seoul

Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Vancouver Recital Society. In 2006 Yu sang

the title role in Mozart’s Zaide in New York, Vienna, and London under the

direction of Peter Sellars and Louis Langree. She has recorded two solo recitals 

in the United Kingdom for bbc Radio. In 2007 emi released her debut disc 

of Mozart and Bach arias. Yu also received a degree in molecular biology from

the University ofTexas at Austin.

4

Program Notes

The art ofthe late nineteenth century largely connotes impressionism, paintings of cafe-concerts and the open air that invoke the entertainments of city life

and the pleasures ofthe landscape. A less familiar side to the story exists, one 

in a realm ofsober contemplation and recherche. These sometimes enigmatic

and often melancholy subjects explore an altogether different dimension of

aesthetic experience and appreciation. In this discreet world ofindividual 

collecting, prints, drawings, and small sculpture were kept aside in portfolios 

or stored away in cabinets for more purposeful, private study, much like taking

a book from the shelffor quiet enjoyment.

The Darker Side ofLight: Arts ofPrivacy 1850-1900, the exhibition currendy

on view in the National Gallery’s prints and drawings galleries, includes more

than a hundred works in the Gallery’s extensive collections that reflect this

late-Romantic sensibility. Such an encounter with art was a private affair that

often encouraged the investigation ofhighly suggestive, sometimes disturbing

subject matter. These complex states ofmind and symptoms of deep social

tension surfaced in opium dreams, obsessions over a lover, despairing contemplations ofsuicide, and abject meditations on violence and death. By no means

restricted to the visual arts, this somber aesthetic found voice in poetry, prose,

theater, and, not least, music. This milieu attracted the talents of academically 

trained artists, realists, impressionists, and especially symbolists. Much like

their musical counterparts, symbolist artists in particular sought to dissolve any

simple equation between the experience of art and the empirical world.

Composers, too, responded to the various moods ofsymbolism, especially in their chamber music. The most famous music of Gabriel Faure, 

Cesar Franck, and Henri Duparc, for example, is characterized by balance,

pleasant sonorities, and flowing lines, but these composers also explored the

darker side ofmusical expression. One thinks ofthe contemplative Andante

from Faure’s String Quartet, op. 121, the enigmatic Scherzo from Franck’s

String Quartet in D Major, or such Duparc songs as Chanson triste (Sad Song), 

La Vie anterieure (The Former Life), and Soupir (Sigh).

5
Among the poets represented in Hyunah Yu’s selection ofsongs for this

concert, Charles Baudelaire may be considered the father ofthe symbolist

movement in Europe. Stimulated by the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, which

he translated into French, Baudelaire articulated the idea ofsynaesthesia, or

the correspondence of all sensations and creative activities—“Les parfums,

les couleurs et les sons se repondent” (Scents, colors, and sounds respond

to one another) (Curiosites esthetiques, 1868). Later symbolist poets Mallarme

and Rimbaud were deeply affected by Baudelaire’s poetry and his opinions

on synaesthesia, as were the other poets represented in this evening’s

program and composers Debussy, Duparc, and Faure.

In terms of his place in the pantheon of French composers and his

political and social views, Vincent d’Indy might be seen as a foil for the other

composers and the poets whose works appear in this program, who were

iconoclastic and liberal-minded, and in some cases downright libertine. 

Among D’Indy’s many compositions for voice, only one uses a text by a

symbolist poet— L’amour et le crane (Love and the Cranium, 1884). D’Indy’s

career as a composer advanced rapidly in the 1880s, due in part to the skill

that he showed in crafting chamber works such as the Trio, op. 29. In 1885

he was appointed to the secretariat ofthe Societe Nationale Musicale. From

that position ofinfluence he was frequently called upon to pass judgment

on the work of other composers, and he proved generous in his encouragement of composers younger and more daring than himself. He gave valuable favorable review to new compositions by Emanuel Chabrier, Claude

Debussy, and Paul Dukas, among others. In his later years, however, D’Indy

became more entrenched as an advocate of conservatism in music, scorning

the innovations ofsuch composers as Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc,

Arnold Schoenberg, and Edgar Varese.

Program notes by Stephen Ackert

6

Next Week at the National Gallery ofArt

ArcoVoce

Music by Merula, Monteverdi, and other composers

Presented in honor of

An Antiquity ofImagination:

Tullio Lombardo and

Venetian High Renaissance Sculpture

October 4, 2009

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court
Texts and Translations

Poulenc Trio with Hyunah Yu, soprano

September 27, 2009

Extase

Jean Lahor (1840-1909)

Sur un lys pale mon coeur dort

D’un sommeil doux comme la mort

Mort exquise, mort parfumee

Du souffle de la bien aimee

Sur ton sein pale mon coeur dort

D’un sommeil doux comme la mort

Soupir

Rene-Franpois Sully Prudhomme

(1839-1907)

Ne jamais la voir ni Pentendre,

Ne jamais tout haut la nommer,

Mais, fidele, toujours Pattendre,

Toujours Paimer!

Ouvrir les bras, et, las d’attendre,

Sur la neant les refermer!

Mais encor, toujours les lui tendre

Toujours Paimer!

Ah! ne pouvoir que les lui tendre

Et dans les pleurs se consumer,

Mais ces pleurs toujours les repandre,

Toujours Paimer!

Ne jamais la voir ni Pentendre,

Ne jamais tout haut la nommer,

Mais d’un amour toujours plus tendre

Toujours Paimer. Toujours!

Ecstasy

My heart sleeps on a pale bed

A sleep as sweet as death,

Exquisite death, death made fragrant

By the breath ofthe beloved;

My heart sleeps on a pale bed

A sleep as sweet as death.

Sigh

Never to see or hear him,

Never to name him aloud,

But, faithful, always to wait for him,

Always to love him!

To open my arms and, tired ofwaiting,

To close them on nothing,

But still always to extend them to him

Always to love him!

Ah! To be able only to stretch them out

to her,

And then to be consumed in tears,

But always to shed these tears,

Always to love him!

Never to see or hear him,

Never to name him aloud,

But with a love ever more tender,

Always to love him! Always!
Chanson triste

Lahor

Dans ton coeur dort un clair de lune,

Un doux clair de lune d'ete,

Et pour fuir la vie importune,

Je me noierai dans ta clarte.

J’oublierai les douleurs passees,

Mon amour, quand tu berceras

Mon triste coeur et mes pensees

Dans le calme aimant de tes bras.

Tu prendras ma tete malade,

Oh! quelquefois, sur tes genoux,

Et lui diras une ballade

Qui semblera parler de nous;

Et dans tes yeux pleins de tristesse,

Dans tes yeux alorsje boirai

Tant de baisers et de tendresse

Que peut-etre je guerirai.

Clair de lune

Paul Verlaine (1844-1896)

Votre ame est un paysage choisi

Que vont charmant masques et 

bergamasques,

Jouant du luth et dansant, et quasi

Tristes sous leurs deguisements

fantasques!

Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur

L'amour vainqueur et la vie opportune.

Ils n’ont pas Pair de croire a leur

bonheur,

Et leur chanson se mele au clair de lune,

Au calme clair de lune triste et beau, 

Qui fait rever, les oiseaux dans les

arbres,

Et sangloter d’extase les jets d’eau,

Les grandsjets d’eau sveltes parmi les

marbres.

Mournful Song

Moonlight sleeps in your heart,

A gentle summer moonlight,

And to escape this troublesome life

I will drown myself in your brightness.

I will forget past sorrows,

My sweet, when you cradle

My sad heart and my thoughts

In the loving calm of your arms.

You will rest my poor head,

Ah! From time to time on your lap,

And recite a ballad

That will seem to speak of us;

Then from your eyes full ofsorrow,

From your eyes I shall drink

So many kisses and so much tenderness

That perhaps I shall be healed.

Moonlight

Your soul is a chosen landscape

where charmed masqueraders and 

revelers come and go, 

playing the lute and dancing and almost

sad beneath their fanciful disguises!

Even while singing, in a minor key,

of victorious love and the good life, 

they do not seem to believe in their own

happiness, and their song blends with the

moonlight,

the calm moonlight, sad and beautiful,

that sets the birds in the trees to

dreaming, and makes the fountains sob 

with ecstasy;

the tall slender fountains among the 

marble statues.

2
Le secret

Armand Silvestre (1837-1901)

Je veux que le matin Tignore

Le nom que j’ai dit a la nuit,

Et qu’au vent de l’aube, sans bruit,

Comme un larme il s’evapore.

Je veux que le jour le proclame

L’amour qu’au matin j’ai cache,

Et sur mon coeur ouvert penche

Comme un grain d’encens il l’enflamme.

Je veux que le couchant l’oublie

Le secret que j’ai dit au jour,

Et l’emporte avec mon amour,

Aux plis de sa robe palie!

Apres un reve

Romain Bussine (1830-1899)

Dans un sommeil que charmait ton

image

Je revais le bonheur, ardent mirage,

Tes yeux etaient plus doux, ta voix pure

et sonore,

Tu rayonnais comme un ciel eclaire par

l’aurore;

Tu m’appelais et je quittais la terre

Pour m’enfuir avec toi vers la lumiere,

Les cieux pour nous entr’ouvraient leurs

nues,

Splendeurs inconnues, lueurs divines

entrevues,

Helas! Helas! triste reveil des songes

Je t’appelle, 6 nuit, rends moi tes

mensonges,

Reviens, reviens radieuse,

Reviens 6 nuit mysterieuse!

The Secret

I want the morning to ignore

the name that I told to the night;

may it evaporate in the wind at dawn,

silently, like a teardrop.

I want the day to proclaim

the love that I hid from the morning,

and to set it aflame over my open heart,

like a grain ofincense.

I want the setting (sun) to forget

the secret that I told to the day,

and to carry it away with my love

in the folds ofits pale robe!

After a Dream

In a sleep charmed by your image

I dreamt of happiness, passionate

mirage;

Your eyes were softer, your voice pure

and sonorous;

You shone as a sky lit by the dawn;

You called me and I left the earth

To escape with you toward the light,

The skies opened their clouds for us,

Their unknown splendors, their divine

glimpses,

Alas! Sad awakening from dreams;

I call you, 0 night, give me back your

falsehoods,

Return in radiance,

O mysterious night!

3
Les roses d’Ispahan

Charles-Marie Rene Leconte de Lisle 

(1818-1894)

Les roses d’Ispahan dans leur gaine de

mousse,

Le jasmins de Mossoul, les fleurs de

Poranger,

Ont un parfum moins frais, une odeur moins

douce,

O blanche Leilah! que ton souffle leger.

Ta levre est de corail et ton rire leger

Sonne mieux que l’eau vive 

et d’une voix plus douce.

Mieux que le vent joyeux qui berce 

Poranger,

Mieux que Poiseau qui chante

au bord d’un nid de mousse.

Mais le subtile odeur des roses dans leur

mousse,

La brise qui se joue autour de Poranger

Et l’eau vive qui flue avec sa plainte douce

Ont un charme plus sur que ton amour leger!

6 Leilah! depuis que de leur vol leger 

Tous les baisers ont fui de ta levre si douce

II n’est plus de parfum dans le pale oranger,

Ni de celeste arome aux roses dans leur

mousse.

L’oiseau, sur le duvet humide et sur la

mousse,

Ne chante plus panni la rose et Poranger; 

L’eau vive desjardins n'a plus de chanson

douce.

L’aube ne dore plus le ciel pur et leger.

Oh! que ton jeune amour ce papillon leger

Revienne vers mon coeur d'une aile prompte

et douce.

Et qu’il parfume encor la fleur de Poranger,

Les roses d'Ispahan dans leur gaine de

mousse.

The Roses ofIsfahan

The roses ofIsfahan in their sheath of moss,

the jasmines of Mosul, the orange blossoms, 

have a fragrance less fresh, an aroma less

sweet,

O pale Leila, than your light breath!

Your lips are coral and your light laughter 

has a softer and lovelier sound than rippling 

water,

lovelier than the joyous breeze that rocks the

orange-tree,

lovelier than the bird that sings near its nest 

ofmoss.

But the subtle fragrance ofthe roses in thenmoss,

the breeze that plays around the orange-tree 

and the spring-water flowing with its

plaintive murmur have a more certain charm 

than your fickle love!

O Leila, ever since in their airy flight 

all the kisses have fled from your lips so

sweet, there is no longer any fragrance from

the pale orange-tree, no heavenly aroma 

from the roses in the moss.

The bird, in its nest ofmoist feathers and

moss,

sings no more among the roses and orangetrees;

the springs in the gardens have lost their soft 

song; and dawn no longer gilds the pure and

weightless sky.

Oh, if only your youthful love, that light

butterfly, would return to my heart on swift

and gentle wings,

and perfume once more the orange blossom 

and the roses ofIsfahan in their sheath of

moss.

4
L’Invitation au voyage

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

Invitation to the Voyage

Mon enfant, ma sceur,

Songe a la douceur

D’aller la-bas vivre ensemble,

Aimer a loisir,

Aimer et mourir

Au pays qui te ressemble.

My child, my sister,

think ofthe sweetness

of going down there to live together!

To love at leisure, 

to love and to die

in a country that is the image of you!

Les soleils mouilles

De ces ciels brouilles

Pour mon esprit ont les charmes

Si mysterieux

De tes traitres yeux,

Brillant a travers leurs larmes.

The misty suns

ofthose changeable skies

have for my fancy the same

mysterious charm 

as your fickle eyes

shining through their tears.

La, tout n’est qu’ordre et beaute,

Luxe, calme et volupte.

There, all is harmony and beauty,

luxury, calm and delight.

Des meubles luisants,

Polis par les ans,

Decoreraient notre chambre,

Les plus rares fleurs

Melant leurs odeurs

Aux vagues senteurs de 1'ambre

Les riches plafonds,

Les miroirs profonds,

La splendeur orientale

Tout y parlerait

A Tame en secret

Sa douce langue natale.

Glittering furniture, 

polished by the ages,

will decorate our room;

The rarest offlowers,

their odors mingling

with the vague scents of amber,

the unlimited riches,

the profound mirrors,

the oriental splendor,

all speaking

to the soul in secret

in its sweet native tongue.

La, tout n’est qu’ordre .... There, all is harmony....

Vois sur ces canaux

Dormir ces vaisseaux

Dont l’humeur est vagabonde;

C’est pour assouvir

Ton moindre desir

Qu’ils viennent du bout du monde.

See how those ships,

nomads by nature,

are slumbering in the canals.

To gratify 

your every desire

they have come from the ends ofthe earth.

Les soleils couchants

Revetent les champs,

Les canaux, la ville entiere,

D’hyacinthe et d'or;

Le monde s’endort

Dans une chaude lumiere!

The setting suns

clothe the fields, 

the canals, and the town

with hyacinthe and gold.

The world falls asleep 

in a heated lantern!

La, tout n’est qu’ordre et beaute,

Luxe, calme et volupte.

There, all is harmony and beauty, 

luxury, calm and delight.

5