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.

For the convenience of concertgoers the Garden Cafe

remains open until 6:00 pm for light refreshments.

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-eighth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery ofArt

2,778th Concert

Dan Franklin Smith, pianist

March 21, 2010

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Admissionfree
Program

Frederic Chopin (1810-1849)

Barcarolle in F-sharp Major, op. 60 (1847)

Grande Valse brilliante in E-flat Major, op. 18 (1840)

Grande Valse in Aflat Major, op. 42 (1840)

Impromptu in Gflat Major, op. 51 (1842)

Mazurka in E Major, op. 6, no. 3 (1830-1832)

Mazurka in Dflat Major, op. 30, no. 3 (1837)

Mazurka in Aflat Major, op. 59, no. 2 (1845)

Ballade no. 1 in G Minor, op. 23 (1835)

INTERMISSION

George Gershwin (1898-1937)

Novelette in Fourths

Three Preludes

Two Song Transcriptions

“Fascinatin’ Rhythm”

“I Got Rhythm”

Aaron Copland (1900-1990)

Sentimental Melody; Blues; Midsummer Nocturne

Dave Brubeck (b. 1920)

Blue Rondo a la Turk

Andre Previn (b. 1929)

Three South American Sketches

The Musician

A resident of New York City, Dan Franklin Smith performs at colleges, 

universities, museums, and concert halls throughout the United States and

Europe. Fie graduated from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and

made his European recital debut in 1997 in Sweden, where he received

a standing ovation and rave reviews. The following year he made his European orchestral debut in Stockholm and was later featured on Swedish

television. A debut recording with the Gavle Symfoniorkester and a recording with the Stuttgart Philharmonic Orchestra soon followed. These premier

recordings received outstanding reviews and continue to be broadcast on

classical music radio stations.

Smith has received high praise from German publications including

the Coburger Tageblatt and Munich’s Die Neue Presse, Munchener Merkur, and

Siiddeutsche Zeitung. His European engagements have included appearances

in Bernried, Coswig, Dessau, Leipzig, and Wittenberg in Germany, as well

as engagements in London, Oslo, Paris, and various cities in Sweden. Later

this year he will appear at the Bruckner Festival in Linz, Austria.

As a chamber musician and vocal accompanist, Smith has performed

at venues such as Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City and

the Cleveland Museum’s Distinguished Artist Series, as well as tours in

Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and Taiwan. Fie is the recipient of a Performing

Artist Grant from the American-Scandinavian Foundation of New York

City. A member ofthe Recording Society as well as the American Matthay

Association, he frequently performs at their yearly conferences. Music

director and recital soloist with the international festival Elysium: Between

Two Continents, Smith appears at the National Gallery by arrangement

with Stephanie Low Artists, Inc., of New York City.

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Program Notes

This year marks the 200th anniversary of Frederic Chopin’s birth. Born in

1810 on either February 22 (as recorded in the city records) or March 1 (as

regularly reported by Chopin himself), Chopin is considered to be one ofthe

greatest artists in the history of Polish culture. A composer ofinternational

standing in his own lifetime, he was a cultural ambassador for the folk music

of Poland and played an exceptional role in shaping the country’s national

identity. Chopin holds the distinction ofbeing the composer whose works are 

most often played on the concert stage. As a composer, he favored ballades, 

etudes, mazurkas, preludes, and waltzes, but he also wrote pieces that do not

fall into any ofthese categories. In his remarkable Barcarolle in F-sharp Major,

the composer eschews the 6/8 time signature that is the hallmark ofthe Venetian gondoliers’ songs that inspired the genre. Instead ofthe shorter phrase

line associated with that meter, Chopin employs the compound meter of 12/8,

producing a depth and breadth ofmelodic line that transcends the Venetian

original. After a three-bar introduction, the piano presents a song that is both

a lovelorn lament and a comforting lullaby.

In 1829 Chopin heard in the salons ofVienna the waltzes ofJohann

Strauss (1804-1849) and Joseph Lanner (1801-1843), in addition to familiar

waltzes from operas. These works, so popular among the Viennese, did 

not arouse Chopin’s interest or win his enthusiasm. In a letter to his father

from October 1829, Chopin expressed his disappointment: “I have absorbed

nothing of a Viennese nature; consequently, I am unable to play waltzes.”

Ironically, his first waltz was written shortly after he wrote to his father. Robert 

Schumann (1810-1856) praised all fourteen ofChopin’s waltzes as being “of

a different character from ordinary waltzes... bearing the unmistakable mark

that only a Chopin could give them.”

In contrast to his waltzes, Chopin’s mazurkas stand out for their

compactness, variety, and strong patriotic overtones. Originally a Polish

dance of heroic cast, the mazurka has a basic triple rhythm with the principal accent on the second or the third beat ofthe measure. Some ofthe

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earlier mazurkas are straightforward dances, but the later ones reach the

level ofmusical poems, reflecting on the full range of human emotions

from sheer happiness to utter despair.

Each ofChopin’s four ballades had its inspiration in the poetry ofhis

compatriot Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855). Although Chopin did not make

reference to any specific poetic ballad for his Ballade in G Minor, op. 23, many

Chopin scholars agree that the story he must have had in mind is Mickiewicz’

Konrad Wallenrod, which tells of a Lithuanian prince who is captured as a boy

and adopted by a knight ofthe Red Cross in the late fourteenth century. The

boy subsequently escapes to his native land, only to find himselfsent back

among the enemy knights as a spy. Fie dies tragically, committing suicide in

despair after being charged with treason. The ballade begins with an introduction marked largo that serves the same function as the storyteller’s introduction, “Once upon a time, long ago....” This seven-bar introduction gives

way to an ongoing narrative that is deeply passionate, even though its tempo

marking is moderato (moderately). The same scholars maintain that Chopin

is here identifying with the homesickness ofthe young prince in exile in the 

story. A briefreprieve from the intensity is followed by a capricious waltz-like

passage. After a return ofthe opening statement, the ballade closes with a

coda offerocious scales and octaves.

For the second part ofthis evening’s program, Dan Franklin Smith

turns to the music oftwentieth-century American composers. George

Gershwin was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where he had the

opportunity to study piano with the highly respected Australian pianist and

teacher Ernest Hutcheson (1871-1951). The bulk of Gershwin’s musical

education came, however, from the music halls and jazz clubs in which he

collaborated with other musicians as a jazz performer. He was the first

true “cross-over” composer, able to blend elements from his classical and

jazz experience into a unified and transcendent whole.

Aaron Copland, also Brooklyn-born, committed his musical career to

the furtherance ofwhat he called the “nascent American school ofmusic,”

which he saw as founded on a solid American musical tradition. As an

educator, he encouraged his younger contemporaries to join him in looking

5
to their American roots for inspiration and incorporating the distinctive

sounds of American folk and patriotic music into their works. Appropriately,

he has been dubbed the “dean oftwentieth-century American composers.”

Jazz composer, pianist, and bandleader Dave Brubeck received early

training in classical music from his mother, who was a pianist. By age thirteen

he was performing professionally with local jazz groups. He was a music

major at the College ofthe Pacific in Stockton, California, and studied composition with Darius Milhaud in 1946. In 1949 he organized the Dave Brubeck

Trio, which expanded in 1951 to become the Dave Brubeck Quartet with the

addition ofalto saxophonist Paul Desmond. During the 1950s and 1960s

Brubeck began experimenting with time signatures unusual to jazz, such as

5/4, 9/8, and 11/4. By 1959 he had recorded the first jazz instrumental piece

to sell a million copies—Paul Desmond’s Take Five (in 5/4 meter)—which

was released with his own Blue Rondo a la Turk. Blue Rondo itselfrepresented

a rhythmic experiment in jazz, as it is in 9/8 meter, grouped 2+2+2-1-3.

Sir Andre George Previn was born Andreas Ludwig Priwin in 1929 in

Berlin, Germany. He entered the Berlin Hochschule fur Musik at age six, but

soon thereafter was forced to flee Germany with the rest ofhis family, first

to France and then to the United States. The family settled in Los Angeles, 

where he quickly learned to use his talents as a pianist, playing accompaniments to silent films in a cult movie house and later becoming an orchestrator

at the MGM film studios. This led to commissions for film scores, some of

them based on Broadway musicals. In his maturity, Previn has turned more to

compositions prompted by the talents of a particular artist. His Piano Concerto

(1985) was written for Vladimir Ashkenazy, and he has also written a darkly 

intense cello sonata for Yo-Yo Ma (1993) and a violin sonata for Gil Shaham

(1994). Previn’s most ambitious work to date is the opera A Streetcar Named

Desire (1998), based on the Tennessee Williams play.

Program notes by Stephen Ackert, head, Music Department,

National Gallery ofArt

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Next Week at the National Gallery of Art

Ignacio Prego de Oliver, harpsichordist

Music by 16th- and 17th-century Spanish composers

Presented in honor of The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting

and Sculpture, 1600-1700 and in collaboration with the Embassy of Spa

in honor of Spain’s presidency in 2010 ofthe European Union

March 24, 2010

Wednesday, 12:10 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Stanford Chamber Chorale with

Chatham Baroque

“The Passion in Music and Art”

Music by Johann Sebastian Bach

Presented in honor of The Sacred Made Real:

Spanish Painting and Sculpture, 1600-1700

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Preconcert talk in the West Building Lecture Hall at 6:00 pm

Concert at 6:30 pm in the West Building, West Garden Court