CONCERTS

77TH SEASON OF

national gallery of art | june 9, 2019
PROGRAM

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THE MUSICIANS

David Krakauer

Few artists have the ability to convey their message to the back row, to galvanize 

an audience with a visceral power that connects on a universal level. David Krakauer 

is such an artist. Widely considered one of the greatest clarinetists today, he has 

been praised internationally as a key innovator in modern klezmer, as well as a major 

voice in classical music. In 2015, he received a Grammy nomination in the chamber 

music / small ensemble category as soloist with the orchestra A Far Cry, as well as 

a Juno nomination for the CD Akoka, with cellist Matt Haimovitz.

For the past decade, Krakauer has emerged as an electrifying symphonic soloist 

who brings his singular sound and powerful approach to the concert stage. He has 

appeared with the world’s finest orchestras, including the Amsterdam Sinfonietta, the 

Baltimore Symphony, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Detroit Symphony, the Weimar 

Staatskapelle, the Orchestre de Lyon, the Phoenix Symphony, the Dresdener Philharmonie, and the Seattle Symphony.

Highlights of Krakauer’s career include performances with the Kronos, Emerson, 

Tokyo, Orion, and Miro String Quartets; performing during the inaugural season of 

Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall with renowned jazz pianist Uri Caine; an eight-year tenure 

with the Naumburg Award–winning Aspen Wind Quintet; tours and recordings with 

Abraham Inc., which Krakauer coleads with Socalled (Joshua Dolgin) and Fred Wesley; 

and performing in the International Emmy Award–winning BBC documentary Holocaust: 

A Music Memorial Film from Auschwitz.

Krakauer’s discography contains some of the most important clarinet recordings 

of recent decades. Among them are The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind 

(Osvaldo Golijov and the Kronos Quartet / Nonesuch), which received the Diapason 

d’Or in France; The Twelve Tribes (Label Bleu), which was designated album of the 

year in the jazz category for the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik; and Paul 

Moravec’s Pulitzer Prize–winning composition Tempest Fantasy (Naxos). He has 

also recorded with violinist Itzhak Perlman / The Klezmatics (Angel) and with Dawn 

Upshaw/Osvaldo Golijov (Deutsche Gramophon). His unique sound can be heard in 

Danny Elfman’s score for the Ang Lee film Taking Woodstock, and throughout Sally 

Potter’s The Tango Lesson. New releases include his 2015 album Checkpoint with 

his band Ancestral Groove (Label Bleu), Paul Moravec’s Clarinet Concerto with the 

Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP/sound), and The Big Picture on his own 

label, Table Pounding Records, in 2014.

An esteemed educator, Krakauer is on the clarinet and chamber music faculties of 

the Manhattan School of Music, the Mannes College of Music (New School), The Bard 

Conservatory, and New York University.

Krakauer-Tagg Duo

David Krakauer, clarinet

Kathleen Tagg, piano 

Connections

June 9, 2019 | 3:30

West Building, West Garden Court

Kinan Azmeh (b. 1976)

November 22 *

Claude Debussy (1862 – 1918)

Première rhapsodie 

John Zorn (b. 1953)

Parzial  *

Kathleen Tagg

Berimbau

Johnny Green (1908 – 1989)

Lyrics by Edward Heyman (1907 – 1981), 

Robert Sour (1905 – 1985), 

and Frank Eyton (1894 – 1962)

“Body and Soul”  * *

Traditional

“Der Gasn Nign”  * * 

Abraham Ellstein (1907 – 1963)

“Chassidic Dance”

Emil Kroitor (b. 1947)

“Moldavian Voyage”  * * 

David Krakauer

Synagogue Wail

Traditional

“Der Heyser Bulgar”  * *

* *Arranged by Kathleen Tagg

* *Arranged by David Krakauer and Kathleen Tagg

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4 5

Kathleen Tagg

Kathleen Tagg is a South African pianist, composer, and producer based in New York 

since 2001. In 2014, she was a South African Music Awards’ nominee for best classical 

album, and she has performed on four continents with a host of leading musicians. 

The breadth of her collaborations defines her multifaceted career.

Tagg has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Lincoln Center, the 92nd Street Y, and 

Symphony Space in New York, but is equally at home in nonconventional spaces and 

theaters. Her performances and numerous recordings range from classical to world 

music, and from musical theater to her own music-mixing improvisation with fully 

realized scores. She holds the Helen Cohn Award as outstanding doctoral graduate 

of the Manhattan School of Music, as well as degrees from the Mannes College and 

the University of Cape Town. She was on the faculty of SongFest at Colburn in Los 

Angeles from 2014 to 2016, and has performed throughout North America, Europe, 

Southern Africa, China, and India. Her recordings have been featured in film and 

television; recent recordings include the songs of Jake Heggie with soprano Regina 

Zona (NAXOS) and Where Worlds Collide (Table Pounding Records) with South 

African jazz pianist Andre Petersen. Her latest recording, Breath & Hammer with 

clarinetist David Krakauer, will be released this season. As a team, Krakauer and Tagg 

created an evening-length work, Keepers of the Flame, for the Borderlands Foundation 

in Sejny, Poland, and have performed their Breath & Hammer project and genrecrossing concert programs on four continents. Tagg’s work has been performed for 

and commissioned by the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra, the New Century Chamber 

Orchestra, and the Jewish Culturefest Vienna. Her musical, Erika’s Wall, cowritten 

with Sophie Jaff, received a developmental production grant from The Music Theater 

Company of Chicago. Tagg was a 2014 – 2015 fellow of the Dramatist Guild of America 

and the Con Ed Exploring the Metropolis Composer-in-Residence in 2017. This season 

includes a newly designed show with David Krakauer and video designer Jesse 

Gilbert for the Boulez Saal in Berlin, and performances at the National Gallery of Art 

in Washington, DC, the Nasher Museum in Dallas, and a month-long residency at the 

University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

PROGRAM NOTES

David Krakauer and Kathleen Tagg’s acoustic program, Connections, is a passionate, 

eclectic, and highly personal musical journey. The musicians share a constant quest to 

redefine the sounds and roles of their instruments, bringing together all aspects of 

their music-making — from influences that range from interlocking African drumming 

patterns to jazz, romantic symphonic music, minimalism, and klezmer. Their acrobatic 

and highly virtuosic arrangements of tunes by a host of performer-composers are 

placed alongside original compositions and complete reimaginings of traditional tunes 

close to their hearts. These artists are known for extending the capabilities of their 

instruments far beyond their traditional sounds. 

November 22 

Kinan Azmeh is a New York–based Syrian clarinetist and composer who performs 

across the globe as a bandleader, soloist with orchestra, collaborator with a wide 

spectrum of artists and genres, and member of the Grammy-winning Silkroad Ensemble. 

This piece was written for a rare Thanksgiving that fell on November 22, and it conjures 

a feeling of nostalgia for his old homeland, alongside an optimism for feeling at home 

in a new country.

Première rhapsodie 

Claude Debussy composed his Première rhapsodie as a competition piece for the 

final examination in clarinet in 1910. While many lovely pieces were written for this 

purpose, one could argue that this is the only masterpiece that has emerged from all 

the morceaux de concours (competition pieces) for the clarinet. Taking a small motive 

from his earlier composition La mer, Debussy has created an incredibly evocative and 

haunting work that is one of the great representative compositions in his late period.

Parzial

John Zorn is an American saxophonist, composer, and leading voice in the New York 

“downtown” arts scene. Under the banner of Radical Jewish Culture, Zorn has explored 

new possibilities for Jewish cultural identity within the context of the avant garde. 

Parzial comes from Zorn’s massive collection of pieces called The Book of Angels, 

and was originally part of a group of eight compositions recorded by Krakauer and 

his band, Ancestral Groove. Later, Tagg adapted Krakauer’s initial concept of this tune 

into full-blown arrangements for Breath & Hammer. Here Zorn imagines a portrait 

of Parzial: The Guardian of the 7th Heavenly Hall.
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Berimbau 

This piece drew initial inspiration from the sounds of the overtone series, as played 

on the Eastern Cape bow instrument Uhadi, cousin of the better-known Brazilian 

berimbau. The work then gives into a driving motion and groove in seven and draws 

on the energy of current New York City and Ellington-like horns.

“Body and Soul”

“Body and Soul” is one of the most iconic pieces from The Great American Songbook, 

written in 1930 with music by Johnny Green and lyrics by Edward Heyman, Robert 

Sour, and Frank Eyton. The song became one of the most widely recorded jazz 

standards with versions by many of the greatest musical artists of the twentieth 

century, including Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, and John Coltrane. Krakauer 

and Tagg’s version pays homage to these great creators and at the same time works 

within the duo’s very personal musical language.

“Der Gasn Nign”

“Der Gasn Nign” is a standard of the Eastern European Jewish klezmer repertoire. 

Krakauer’s creation of an arrangement of this traditional celebration tune required 

drawing from the old 1920’s klezmer recordings as primary source material. However, 

influences from his work with colleagues over the past fifteen years are also blended 

in. This clarinet and piano version of “Der Gasn Nign” includes a recreation of the 

haunting atmosphere of the electric guitar that Krakauer originally arranged for his 

band Ancestral Groove.

“Chassidic Dance” 

The delightful “Chassidic Dance” was originally written for clarinet and piano and was 

orchestrated in the 1960s. Abraham Ellstein was one of the great composers for the 

Yiddish Theatre, and his score for the 1936 romantic comedy Yidl mitn Fidl is one of 

the classic Yiddish film scores.

“Moldavian Voyage”

One of the great gatekeepers of klezmer from the region now known as Moldavia was 

a clarinetist named German Goldenshteyn. He came to New York in 1994, bringing 

with him his region’s traditional Jewish music. He is believed to have carried nearly a 

thousand tunes in his head, one of which was this one, written by the great Moldavian 

accordionist and composer Emil Kroitor (b. 1947). Krakauer and Tagg reimagine this 

piece as an epic journey both geographic and political.

Synagogue Wail 

Synagogue Wail is Krakauer’s own, semi-improvised composition for unaccompanied 

clarinet that is kind of a portrait of his whole musical world in about five minutes. He 

takes the basic idea of a klezmer improvisation, mixes it with influences of jazz, funk, 

and minimalism and pulls the whole thing together with crazy extended techniques. 

It’s a wild ride!

“Der Heyser Bulgar”

“Der Heyser Bulgar” is one of the most well-known works from the klezmer repertoire 

of Eastern European Jewish klezmer music and means “The Hot Bulgar.”
Upcoming Events of the SeventySeventh Season of The William Nelson 

Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin Concerts

Unless otherwise noted, concerts 

are held in the West Building, West 

Garden Court.

Emily Wells, multi-instrumentalist, 

vocalist, and composer

In honor of LGBT Pride Month

June 12, 12:00

East Building Auditorium

Inscape Chamber Orchestra

Richard Scerbo, director

The Genius of Paul Hindemith

A program commemorating

Leonard Bernstein’s famous

Young People’s Concerts.

June 16, 3:30

Noah Getz and Friends

Sound Sketches

June 21, 12:10

East Building Mezzanine

Air Force Strings

The Latin American Spirit

A program commemorating 

Leonard Bernstein’s famous 

Young People’s Concerts

June 23, 3:30

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.

—

The department of music produced 

these program notes. Copyright © 2019 

Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, 

Washington

cover Herbert Bayer, Charting the Future 

(detail), 1976, National Gallery of Art, 

Washington, Gift of Stephen P. Strickland 

in memory of Tamara G. Strickland

NGA.GOV/MUSIC