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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-sixth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery ofArt

2,674th Concert

Poulenc Trio

Vladimir Lande, oboe

Bryan Young, bassoon

Irina Kaplan Lande, piano

May 4, 2008

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Admissionfree
Program

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Trio in B-jlat Major, op. 11 (c. 1791)

Allegro con brio

Adagio

Tema con variazioni

Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857)

Trio Pathetique in D Minor (1832)

Allegro moderato

Scherzo

Largo

Allegro con spirito

INTERMISSION

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)

Triofor Piano, Oboe, and Bassoon (1926)

Presto 

Andante

Rondo

Andre Previn (b. 1929)

Triofor Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano (1994)

Lively

Slow

Jaunty

The Musicians

The Poulenc Trio brings together three uniquely gifted virtuosi, oboist

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

The Trio’s performances in the unusual combination oftheir respective

instruments transport audiences into a world ofbeautiful sonorities, playful

rhythms, and dramatic excitement. One of a select few professional wind

trios, the Poulenc Trio is committed to expanding the repertoire through the 

discovery of old masterpieces and new works.

The Trio was recently featured at Italy’s Ravello Festival, where it premiered two new compositions written especially for them. The new pieces,

by Italian composer Gaetano Panariello and Russian-American composer

Igor Raykhelson, add to the Trio’s growing catalogue ofnew commissions,

which includes two works premiered with violinist Hilary Hahn and two

Triple Concertos with orchestra, premiered during the 2006-2007 and

current seasons.

The Trio’s busy concert schedule has included a recent tour of Russia

with Hilary Hahn, a tour in the Islands ofthe Caribbean, and multiple

appearances across the United States. Highlights ofthe Trio’s current

season include a performance at the United States Performing Arts Exchange

Conference; a whistle-stop tour ofthe western United States; and concerts 

in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio,

Washington, DC, and Wisconsin. The Trio will also continue its Music at

the Museum series, begun in 2004 to sold-out performances at the Walters

Art Museum in Baltimore, and recently expanded to performances at the 

National Gallery and the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Jersey. This innovative series, which links musical and historical themes to current museum

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

celebrities, and expert lecturers. Guest artists for the popular series have

included clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein, soprano Hyunah Yu, and the Berlinbased Jacques Thibaud Trio, and will include the National Gallery Chamber

Players in the 2008-2009 season.

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The Poulenc Trio has garnered positive attention in recent full-length

profiles by Chamber Music Magazine and by the Double Reed Journal. The

group has been called “virtuosos of classical and contemporary chamber

music” in a profile for Russian television, and it has been repeatedly praised

by the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, and Fanfare Magazine.

The Program

The opening work on this program is a transcription ofBeethoven’s Triofor

Violin, Cello, and Piano in B-flat Major, op. 11, in which the oboe takes the place 

ofthe violin and the bassoon that ofthe cello. In the opening Allegro, emphatic

unison passages communicate strength and firmness ofpurpose. The second

movement (Adagio) moves to the subdominant key (E-flat major) and introduces a minuet, usually missing from a three-movement work in the Classical 

period. The third movement is a set ofnine variations on a tune from a comic

opera by Joseph Weigl (1766-1846), who was the director ofmusic at Vienna’s

Karntnertor Theater. It reminds the listener that as a young man Beethoven, 

who is remembered with such serious reverence by posterity, attended and

enjoyed the light entertainments ofhis day. Beethoven, full ofidealism and

enthusiasm, was twenty when he wrote the Trio. He already showed some

worldly wisdom, however, as he dedicated the trio to Countess von Thun, the

mother-in-law of an influential patron, Prince Karl Lichnowsky, who had

already shown interest in his work.

Musicologists have called Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka the first great

Russian composer. He wrote his Trio Pathetique while sojourning in Italy for

the sake ofhis health. He was subjected to painful treatments for a respiratory ailment, but he nevertheless made good use ofhis time in Italy, studying composition at the Milan Conservatory and encountering as often as

possible the music ofVincenzo Bellini (1801-1835) and Gaetano Donizetti

(1797_1^4^)- His letters to his family from that time reveal that he was also 

susceptible to some ofItaly’s other charms. An excerpt reads: “a little Italian

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bedroom, a pretty moonlight glistening in through the window, and, reposing there, a beautiful Italian girl. Her black hair falls free...upon her shoulders and her bosom... Everything about her declares passion and voluptuousness.” In the margin ofthe manuscript for the trio, Glinka wrote: “I

have known love only by the pain it brings,” prompting subsequent editors

to dub this the Trio Pathetique—a misleading subtitle, given the work’s

overall genial and lyrical tone.

Francis Poulenc attained a recognizable compositional style and considerable fame as a composer while still in his twenties. He was one of a group

ofyoung French composers who banded together in the 1920s and became

known as “Les Six” (Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius

Milhaud, Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre). He was the most successful of

the six in producing music that reflected the group’s manifesto, which can

be paraphrased: wittiness and urbanity in music are good; cerebral, pious, or

pompous music is bad. His music is marked by close juxtapositions ofwit

and irony with lush, sentimental passages.

Poulenc’s Triofor Piano, Oboe, and Bassoon recalls the spirit of an

eighteenth-century divertissement, spicing it with twentieth-century dissonances. The composer alternately combines and contrasts the two families

ofinstruments represented in a wind trio—winds and percussion—with

great effectiveness. The composer looked to prototypes in trios by three of

his great predecessors—for the first movement (Presto), Josef Haydn; for 

the second (Andante), Mozart; and for the final Rondo, Saint-Saens. Thanks

to Poulenc’s constantly shifting tonality and chromaticism, the work pays 

homage to earlier great composers without sounding derivative.

Bom in Germany, Andre Previn immigrated with his family to the

United States in 1939 to escape Nazi persecution. He attended Beverly Hills

High School in Los Angeles and devoted the first part of his career to jazz.

In the 1960s, Previn turned to orchestral conducting and composition in a

variety ofstyles. He was appointed conductor ofthe Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in 1985 and held the post until 1989.

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Previn’s Triofor Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano was the result of a joint

commission from the Orchestra of Saint Luke’s, the National Endowment

for the Arts, and the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust. It received its premiere performance in 1996. Remembering his roots in jazz, Previn incorporates jazz rhythms in the trio as well as open harmonies such as are frequently found in the music ofAaron Copland (1900-1990) and Roy Harris

(1898-1979). Well aware that Poulenc had set the stage for all subsequent

wind trios with his Triofor Piano, Oboe, and Bassoon, Previn employed the

same technique of presenting the instruments in families (oboe and bassoon together, piano by itselfin contrast), particularly in the last movement

(Jaunty) ofhis trio.

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Next Week at the National Gallery ofArt

Opera Lafayette

Ryan Brown, conductor and artistic director

Music by Monsigny and David

May 11, 2008

Sunday evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court