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74TH SEASON 

OF CONCERTS

OCTOBER 18, 2015• NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
PROGRAM

3:30 • West Building, West Garden Court

Poulenc Trio

Irina Kaplan, piano

Bryan Young, bassoon

Special guest oboist, Liang Wang,

principal, New York Philharmonic

Commentary by Stephen Ackert

Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (1804-1857)

Trio Pathetique in D Minor (1832)

Allegro Moderato

Scherzo

Largo; Allegro con spirito

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

Suite No. 7 (1925)

Andante

Napolitana

Espanola

Balalaika

Suite No. 2 (1921)

March

Waltz

Polka

Galop

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)

Sonata for oboe and piano (1962)

Elegie

Scherzo

Deploration

Trio for piano, oboe, and bassoon (1926)

Presto

Andante

Rondo

The Musicians

Poulenc Trio

The Poulenc Trio is the most active touring piano-wind chamber music ensemble in the 

world. Since its founding in 2003, the trio has performed in forty-five of the fifty United States,

and at music festivals around the world, including the White Nights Festival in Russia,

where the group premiered two new works with violinist Hilary Hahn.

The Poulenc Trio has a strong commitment to commissioning, performing, and

recording new works by living composers. Over the years, the trio has greatly expanded the 

repertoire available for the oboe, bassoon, and piano, with twenty-two new works written

for and premiered by the group, including three triple concertos for the trio and full orchestra.

The ensemble has also made a commitment to explore and promote music that

reflects its members' African, Pan-American, Eastern European, and Jewish heritages. Recent

concerts have featured works by Afro Cuban jazz great Paquito D'Rivera, Mexican American

composer Carlos Medina, and Russian American composer Nataliya Medvedovskaya, as well 

as composer Jakov Jakoulov's Yiddish Lexicon, an exploration of Jewish culture.

The trio launched the pioneering concert series Music at the Museum, in which

musical performances are paired with museum exhibitions, with special appearances from

guest artists and curators. As part of the series, the trio has collaborated with the National

Gallery of Art in Washington, the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, the Baltimore Museum

of Art, and the Hermitage State Museum in St. Petersburg. Guest artist collaborators have

included violinist Hilary Hahn, the Thibaud Trio of Berlin, soprano Hyunah Yu, and clarinetists Alexander Fiterstein and Anthony McGill.

The Poulenc Trio is deeply engaged in musical and educational outreach programs, 

including Pizza and Poulenc, an informal performance and residency series for younger

audiences around the United States. The trio regularly conducts master classes, with recent

engagements at the University of Ohio, San Francisco State University, Florida State

University, and the University of Colima in Mexico.

74th Season • 3
Liang Wang

Liang Wang joined the New York Philharmonic in September 2006, and occupies the Alice

Tully Chair as principal oboist. Previously, he was principal oboe of the Cincinnati Symphony

Orchestra, Santa Fe Opera, and San Francisco Ballet Orchestra; associate principal oboe of 

the San Francisco Symphony; and guest principal oboe of the Chicago and San Francisco

Symphony Orchestras. FHe has performed many times as concerto soloist with the New 

York Philharmonic, including in Hong Kong during the orchestra's 2008 tour of Asia, when

he played Richard Strauss's Oboe Concerto, led by Xian Zhang.

Recipient of the 2014 Beijing International Music Festival Artist of the Year award, 

Wang served as artist-in-residence of the Qing Dao Symphony Orchestra, his hometown

orchestra, in the 2014-15 season. He was invited by the presidents of China and France to

perform Chen Qigang's Extase with the Orchestre Colonne de France at the Versailles Royal

Opera House in March 2014, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of France-China diplomacy.

Born in Qing Dao, China, in 1980, Liang Wang began oboe studies at the age of

seven. In 1993, he enrolled at the Beijing Central Conservatory, and in 2003, he completed

his bachelor's degree at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied with

the principal oboist of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Richard Woodhams. Wang is an alumnus

of the Music Academy of the West, now a partner in the New York Philharmonic Global 

Academy. He currently serves on the faculties of the Manhattan School of Music and New 

York University and is an honorary professor at Beijing's Central Conservatory of Music and

the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.

4 • National Gallery of Art

Program Notes

Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka is often referred to as the "Father of Russian Music" because of his

pioneering incorporation of traditional Russian folk melody, history, and culture into his

operas Ivan Susanin (A Life for the Tsar) and Ruslan and Lyudmila. Glinka's use of Russian

themes in opera and other Western-style concert music had a broad influence on the

Russian composers that followed him, including those known as The New Russian School,

or The Five. Sergei Diaghilev, the Ballets Russes founder who worked closely with artist

Marc Chagall's teacher Leon Bakst, adored Glinka and was said by friends to "know Ruslan

and Lyudmila by heart."

In 1830, after formal studies and an early career in St. Petersburg, Glinka traveled to

Italy. During his three years abroad, the composer formed his mature style, writing several

works for instrumental ensemble, including the Trio Pathetique. Glinka's compositions of this

period, including the Trio, illustrate his unique ability to blend traditional source materials

(in this case, the Italian bel canto singing style) with contemporary, international composition techniques. Part of Glinka's influence on Russian national musical identity was his use

of ethnic song texts, titles, and aesthetic devices designed to evoke the sounds of the East.

In Glinka's time, many Russians would have considered melodies from Jewish tradition to

be part of an exotic "Orientalism" that included music from the Tatars, Georgians, Armenians, and other nationalities from the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Middle East.

Flush with the success of Firebird (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913), Stravinsky's

fortunes fell precipitously after the outbreak of World War I, forcing him and his family into

exile in Switzerland from 1914 to 1920. Operations at the Ballets Russes temporarily ceased

because of the war, thus suspending the composer's main source of income. During the first

years of exile, he focused on compositions for smaller ensembles, and worked to further

incorporate Russian language and folk idioms into his work.

Stravinsky's two Suites for Small Orchestra were originally sketched during this Swiss

period and were orchestrated in 1921 and 1925. The original material for the suites came 

from a set of piano duets, Three Easy Pieces (1915) and Five Easy Pieces (1917), which Stravinsky wrote as etudes for his children. Each movement of Three Easy Pieces is dedicated to a

colleague —composers Alfredo Casella and Erik Satie, and Ballet Russes' leader, Diaghilev.

The music historian Anetta Floirat suggests that both Stravinsky and Chagall's work

are linked by their strong rooting in tradition. Although both had a common Russian background,

their early exposure to religion and art were very different, with Chagall exposed to the

Jewish life of Vitebsk and Stravinsky steeped in Christian orthodoxy and later Catholicism.

However, Stravinsky did have early exposure to Jewish music, describing his family's country

home in the mostly Jewish Ukrainian village of Ustilug as "something out of Chagall."

Both Stravinsky and Chagall developed their art in St. Petersburg in the orbit of the

World of Art movement, whose luminaries included Bakst, Roerich, and Diaghilev. A main 

tenet of the World of Art's manifesto promoted the preservation of disappearing traditions

and the creation of new, folklore-inspired art, a goal that both Chagall and Stravinsky 

achieved in many of their works. Perhaps as interesting as the intersection of their artistic

impulses, is Chagall and Stravinsky's ability to turn their early emigration and exile from

74th Season * 5
Russia into spectacular and successful careers in Europe and America. Chagall would later

work with Stravinsky indirectly, designing Alicia Markova's costume for American Ballet

Theater's 1945 production of Firebird, as well as scenery for George Balanchine and Jerome

Robbins' staging of that work with the New York City Ballet in 1970.

Francis Poulenc was born in Paris to a wealthy family of pharmaceutical manufacturers (the firm Roche-Poulenc existed until 1999, when it became part of what is today known 

as Sanofi-Aventis). Poulenc was introduced to music by his mother, who taught him piano,

and by his uncle Papoum, her brother, who influenced Poulenc's lifelong love of Parisian

theater, cafes, and nightlife. At sixteen, Poulenc began studying with Ricardo Vines, an avid

avant-garde pianist and friend of Ravel, Debussy, and Satie. Around the same time, Poulenc

met Auric, Honegger, and Milhaud, and dedicated his first published composition, Rapsodie

negre, to them.

As a member of the group of French composers known as Fes Six, Poulenc contributed

two pieces to the group's highly regarded collective works, the Album des Six, and a ballet, 

Les Maries de La Tour Eiffel, based on a text by Jean Cocteau, which Chagall chose as the 

subject of a surrealist painting of the same title, completed in 1939. Poulenc also celebrated

Chagall in his 1956 song cycle Le Travail du Peintre (The Work of the Painter), based on

poetry by Paul Eluard. Each song in the cycle is dedicated to a painter, including Picasso,

Chagall, Braque, and others. One of Eluard's verses on Chagall reads:

Ane ou vache coq ou cheval Donkey or cow rooster or horse

Jusqu'a la peau d'un violon Even the skin of a violin

Homme chanteur un seul oiseau A singing man a single bird

Danseur agile avec sa femme... An agile dancer with his wife

In a letter dated October 1957, Chagall thanked Poulenc for his tribute in Le Travail, and for

his signed copy of the score.

Poulenc wrote his oboe sonata in 1962. The piece is dedicated to the memory of

Sergei Prokofiev, the Russian composer who had died a decade before. Along with his

clarinet sonata, it is among the composer's final works. Written in Cannes in 1926 and

dedicated to Manuel de Falla, Poulenc's Trio for piano, oboe, and bassoon reflects his own 

virtuosic skill as a pianist and his great admiration for wind instruments.

Program notes by Bryan Young

Special thanks to Valeska Wittig, graduate intern, Department of Academic Programs,

for her research on Chagall and music.

6 * National Gallery of Art

The Seventy-Fourth Season of General Information

The William Nelson Cromwell and

F. Lammot Belin Upcoming Concerts

Nordic Weekend Celebrating

150th Birthdays of Jean Sibelius 

and Carl Nielsen

National Gallery of Art String Quartet

October 23, Friday, 12:00

West Building, West Garden Court

National Gallery of Art Piano Trio 

October 24, Saturday, 12:00

West Building, West Garden Court

National Gallery of Art Orchestra

Peter Wilson, guest conductor

October 25, Sunday, 3:30

West Building, West Garden Court

Music by Sibelius and Nielson

Inscape Chamber Orchestra

Music by Dallapiccola, Gorecki,

Hallman, Scriabin, and Young

November 1, Sunday, 3:30

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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www.twitter.com/ngadc

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The department of music produced these

program notes. Copyright © 2075 Board of

Trustees, National Gallery ofArt, Washington.

Cover Jacques Villon, Spanish Dancer (Danseuse

Espagnole) (detail), 1899, National Gallery of

Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs.

Paul Mellon

Back cover West Building, East Garden Court,

National Gallery of Art, Gallery Archives

© Dennis Brack/Black Star