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.

Music Department

National Gallery ofArt

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue nw

Washington, dc

www.nga.gov

The Seventieth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery ofArt

2,858th Concert

Verdehr Trio

Walter Verdehr, violin

Elsa Ludewig-Verdehr, clarinet

Silvia Roederer, piano

Presented in honor of

Warhol: Headlines

November 23, 2011

Wednesday, 12:10 pm

West Building Lecture Hall

Admissionfree
Program

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Andante and Allegro, op. 43, no. 14

From Creatures ofPrometheus (1801)

Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007)

Trio (1996)

Capriccio

Romanza

Envoi

Michael Daugherty (b. 1954)

Ladder to the Moon (2011)

Night, New York

Looking Up

Washington Premiere Performance

David Winkler (b. 1948)

Warhol Appassionata (2011)

Molto espressivo 

Adagio

Allegro, energico

World Premiere Performance

The Musicians

A leading ensemble in the field of new music, the Verdehr Trio has commissioned more than two hundred works from some ofthe world’s most eminent

composers. When the Verdehr Trio began its work in the 1970s, the repertoire for clarinet trios consisted of a handful ofworks by Bartok, Berg, Ives,

Khachaturian, Krenek, Milhaud, Poulenc, and Stravinsky. Now that the number ofworks for clarinet trio has grown significantly, it can be recognized as

a major musical genre together with the piano trio, woodwind and brass 

quintets, and the piano quartet. To round out its repertoire with classical and 

romantic works, the Trio has rediscovered as well as transcribed eighteenthand nineteenth-century pieces for inclusion in its recitals. The ensemble has 

also commissioned double concertos for violin and clarinet and orchestra as

well as trio concertos for violin, clarinet, piano, and orchestra.

In addition to producing recordings ofthe new works written for it, the

Verdehr Trio has originated a video series, The Making ofa Medium, hosted

by celebrated commentator and author Martin Bookspan, featuring prominent composers and their works written for the ensemble. The subject of an 

article in the New Grove Dictionary ofMusic and Musicians, the Trio won an 

Adventuresome Programming Award from the American Society of Composers and Publishers and Chamber Music America. Currently in residence 

at Michigan State University in East Lansing, the Verdehr Trio maintains a

webite at www.verdehr.com.

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Program Notes

Among the foremost artists ofthe twentieth century, Andy Warhol’s visual

vocabulary has become a part ofthe vernacular from which it originally

derived. The exhibition Warhol: Headlines brings together works that the 

artist based largely on headlines from the tabloid news. Warhol had a lifelong obsession with the sensational side of contemporary news media, and

examples of his source materials for the works of art are presented for comparison, revealing Warhol’s role as both editor and author. Because his art 

traversed high, low, and popular culture and could be experienced in the 

gallery, museum, or concert setting, Warhol continues to be relevant and 

inspire presentations in new contexts. In addition to this concert, there will

be a special performance in the exhibition space on December 10 at 3:30 pm. 

The exhibition remains on view until January 2, 2012.

Andy Warhol was deeply involved in music as a listener, interpreter, and 

presenter, and collaborated throughout the 1960s and 1970s with Lou Reed,

John Cale, and the Velvet Underground. In New York City, he followed the

avant-garde music ofJohn Cage, and subscribed to the Metropolitan Opera.

A loyal opera fan throughout his life, Warhol attended the world premiere of

Samuel Barber’s Vanessa on January 15,1958, produced by Gian Carlo Menotti.

In an exchange ofnotes after the performance, Warhol congratulated the 

opera’s set and costume designer, Cecil Beaton, and sent him a copy ofthe

catalogue from his most recent exhibition, Golden Pictures. Warhol’s writings

make frequent reference to his near-obsession with the voice of Maria Callas,

from his presence in the audience in 1956 at the Metropolitan Opera, as she

sang the title role in Norma, to her farewell recital in 1974 at Carnegie Hall,

which Warhol attended. Warhol also went to great lengths to create his print,

Beethoven, which he fastidiously reworked before he felt it was complete.

Beethoven’s Andante and Allegretto, op. 43, no. 14, is taken from the 

ballet Creatures ofPrometheus, op. 43. Written between 1800 and 1801, it was

Beethoven’s introduction to the Viennese stage and its first performance was

given in the Burgtheater in Vienna on March 28,1801. The ballet consists of

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an overture, an introduction, and sixteen dance numbers. Dance number

fourteen was originally scored for oboe, basset horn, and orchestra. It has

been arranged for violin, clarinet, and piano by the Verdehr Trio.

The commission for Gian Carlo Menotti’s Trio for violin, clarinet, and

piano began with a letter that Walter Verdehr wrote to the composer in 1987.

Two years later Menotti agreed to the project, but was unable to place it in his 

schedule until 1995, when he offered to present it for a Verdehr Trio concert 

at Carnegie Recital Hall in honor ofthe fiftieth anniversary ofthe United

Nations. Only the second movement was completed for that concert, and,

due to injuries from a fall, Menotti requested postponement ofthe premiere

ofthe full three-movement Trio until the celebration of his eighty-fifth birthday the following year. He managed to finish the first movement by that

date, and the Verdehr Trio premiered the first two movements at the 1996

Spoleto Festival in Italy. Menotti promised to send the third movement in

time for a concert to be held in September 1996 at Michigan State University

in honor of his birthday. The final movement did not arrive in East Lansing,

however, until that concert, too, had passed. Nevertheless, the Trio felt honored by Menotti s intense effort to complete the work, in spite ofhis age and

physical difficulties, and since then has regularly presented it in concert.

Rich with cultural and political allusions and bearing the stamp of

classic modernism, Michael Daugherty’s music mixes tonalities and blocks

of contrasting sound with eloquent and stirring melodies. Daugherty first

received international attention in 1994, when the Baltimore Symphony 

Orchestra, conducted by David Zinman, performed his Metropolis Symphony

at Carnegie Hall. Since that time, Daugherty’s music has entered the 

orchestral, band, and chamber music repertory and made him one ofthe 

ten most performed living American composers, according to the League of

American Orchestras,

About Ladder to the Moon, Daugherty writes:

Ladder to the Moon is inspired by the urban landscapes of American artist Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), who lived and painted

in Manhattan before moving to New Mexico in 1934. From 1925

to 1930, O’Keeffe created more than twenty paintings of newly

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constructed New York skyscrapers, such as the Radiator Building and the Shelton Hotel. Like Alfred Stieglitz and other

experimental photographers ofthe era, O’Keeffe discovered a

different reality in the form ofskyscrapers, simultaneously

realistic and abstract. Although Stieglitz (her husband at the

time) claimed it was an impossible idea for a woman to paint

New York, O’Keeffe went on to create some of her finest work 

during this time, motivated by her own conviction that “one

can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.”

Night, New York is my musical perspective on skyscrapers as

seen by O’Keeffe from an elevated height in New York at night:

she often painted from her high-rise apartment on the thirteenth floor of the Shelton Hotel. Like her paintings, which

featured only one or two buildings in the calm ofthe night,

the music ofthis movement is intimate. Soulful woodwind

melodies rise in dark soaring spirals to evoke a nocturnal view.

A violin plays repeated pizzicato (plucked) and arco (bowed)

patterns, providing a counterpoint like the visual rhythm of

hundreds of brightly lit windows on a skyscraper seen from afar.

Looking Up offers another musical perspective on skyscrapers,

as seen from below. In 1927 O’Keeffe painted the Radiator 

Building, looking from the ground up and leading the eye

upward on a ladder ofvision. In this movement I have composed a ladder ofsound, featuring virtuosic and expressive 

music for the violin in ascending vertical lines.

Executive and artistic director ofthe New York-based ensemble Chamber

Players International since 1998, David Winkler has been composer-inresidence with the Aspen Music Festival, the BanffCentre, the Chautauqua

Opera, the Lincoln Center Institute, and Opera Omaha. He has more than

two hundred compositions to his credit, including three symphonies, six 

operas, two violin concertos, a piano concerto, and numerous chamber

music works.

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About Warhol Appassionata, Winkler writes:

Warhol Appassionata is a new work I have composed for the

Verdehr Trio and this concert celebration of Warhol: Headlines at

the National Gallery. When the opportunity arose to create this

work, my first thought was to develop a thematic idea or an

aesthetic approach for the project. I immediately began perusing the works ofAndy Warhol in museums, catalogues, books, 

and films—works I had already known and works that were

new to me—to see as much as I could see. I found myself

returning to the Beethoven prints for several reasons (and not

just the obvious composer reference). In the texture and

multi-level activity ofthese works, I could see the connection

between Warhol and Beethoven. The vertical dimension in 

these portraits is the critical link to classical music and the

world of counterpoint and harmony that I believe makes

musical development possible. As for the title, I have tried to

give equal weight to both the artist and his composer-subject

while at the same time implying something about my new work.

Program notes by Walter Verdehr

Next week at the National Gallery ofArt

Steven Spooner, pianist

Music by 

Liszt and Fairouz

November 27, 2011

Sunday, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court