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

cover: Paul Gauguin, Musique barbare (Barbaric Music), 1893,

Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett, Gift of Richard Doetsch-Benziger

The Sixty-ninth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery ofArt

2,829th Concert

Wilhem Latchoumia, pianist

Presented in honor of Gauguin: Maker ofMyth

and in collaboration with the Embassy of France

March 2, 2011

Wednesday, 12:10 pm

East Building Auditorium

Admissionfree
Program

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

From Images, Book1

Reflets dansI’eau (1905)

Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959)

Prole do bebe (ler Cahier)-Baby’s Family (Set 1) (1918)

Branquinha (A Boneca de loufa)

Little White Doll [The Porcelain Doll]

Moreninha (A Boneca de massa)

Little Brunette Doll [The Paste Doll]

Caboclinha (A Boneca de barro)

Little Mestiza Doll [The Clay Doll]

Mulatinha (A Boneca de borracha)

Little Mulatta Doll [The Rubber Doll]

Negrinha (A Boneca de pau)

Little Black Doll [The Wooden Doll]

A Pobrezinha (A Boneca de trapo)

The Poor Little Doll [The Rag Doll]

O Polichinelo

Punch

A Bruxa (A Boneca de pano)

The Witch [The Cloth Doll]

Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947)

Deux Etudes pour le piano (1927)

Jorge“Lobito” Martinez (1952-2003)

Juegos de los ninos

Andre Boucourechliev (1925-1997)

Archipel iv (1970)

Debussy

Six Epigraphes antiques (1914)

Pour invoquer Pan, dieu du ventd’ete

Pour un tombeau sans nom

Pour que la nuit soit propice

Pour la danseuse aux crotales

Pourl’Egyptienne

Pour remercier la pluie au matin

Ignacio Cervantes (1847-1905)

Ilusiones perdidas (c. 1880)

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

From Miroirs (1905)

Alborada del grazioso

This concert is made possible in part by support from La Maison

Fran$aise at the Embassy of France, the French American Cultural

Foundation, and edf
The Musician

Bom in Lyon in 1974, Wilhem Latchoumia performs regularly in recitals

and chamber music concerts and as a concerto soloist with orchestras. He

has performed at the Cite de la Musique and the Musee d’Orsay in Paris,

the Gubbio Summer Festival in Italy, Retour au Pays Natal in Martinique,

the Xeracion Festival in Spain, and the Young Euro Classic Festival in

Berlin. He has given concerts in Belarus, China, Estonia, Lebanon, Poland,

South America, Turkey, and the United States. A passionate extoller of

contemporary music, Latchoumia collaborates with composers, conductors,

and musicians including Gilbert Amy, Pierre Boulez, Jonathan Harvey,

Michael Jarrell, Pierre Jodlowski, Frederic Kahn, Karl Naegelen, Jose Manuel

Lopez-Lopez, and Frederic Pattar.

Program Notes

The early twentieth century was a period ofrigorous innovation and iconoclasm in France, as artists such as Paul Cezanne, Odilon Redon, and Henri

Rousseau and composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel expanded the

aesthetic concepts that had been formulated by nineteenth-century symbolist authors and poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, and

Paul Verlaine. Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) lived only three years into the

twentieth century, but his later work set the stage for what was to come in

the post-impressionist and early modern periods. The exhibition Gauguin:

Maker ofMyth examines the artist’s use ofreligious and mythological

symbols to tell stories, reinventing or appropriating narratives and myths.

Drawing from the symbolism in his European cultural heritage and from

Maori legend, Gauguin invested his art with deeper meaning, ritual, and

myth—a fusion that continues to mesmerize viewers of his works. The

exhibition remains on view in the East Building until June 5, 2011.

In honor ofthe exhibition, pianist Wilhem Latchoumia has selected music

by composers who accomplished a similar synthesis. The Latin-American

composers featured today brought together rituals, myths, and sounds from

4

their own ethnic cultures. Debussy and Ravel drew deeply from the symbolist tradition offusing visual and aural images, while at times also recalling

ancient archetypes and legends.

Debussy composed three sets of Images, the first published in 1905.

According to the composer, Reflets dans I’eau (Reflections on the Water), the

first piece in volume one, represented “the most recent discoveries ofharmonic chemistry.” Inspired by the sea, it is one ofhis most popular and

evocative pieces. He imagined it as the musical equivalent of a pebble being

tossed onto calm water to create ever-widening ripples. At its most sonorous,

it mirrors the powerful sea music of his opera Pelleas et Melisande.

Heitor Villa-Lobos wrote three sets, or cahiers, ofshort piano pieces

called Prole do bebe (Baby’s Family). The “family” in this suite is the baby’s

collection of dolls ofvarious materials, and the eight dolls in this suite are

symbolic ofthe racial diversity of Brazil. Villa-Lobos treats the racial or 

symbolic identity of each doll as its name, and, except in one instance—“A

Bruxa”—attaches a diminutive. The diminutive carries a sense ofsweetness

and tenderness in the Portuguese language. The suite is dedicated to the

composer’s wife, and it is said that Villa-Lobos was inspired by listening to 

her play Schumann’s Kinderszenen and Albumfor the Young. Difficult and

often virtuosic, Prole do bebe, while inspired by reflections of childhood, is by

no means intended for children to play.

Bom in Venezuela to parents of German and Venezuelan extraction,

Reynaldo Hahn and his family moved to Paris when he was three years old.

Though he was not French, he became imbued with the French nationalistic

style due to his French music education and a life spent in cosmopolitan Paris.

Best known as a composer ofsongs, which he wrote in the classic tradition

ofthe French melodie, Hahn also composed several works for the stage and

solo piano works.

Jorge “Lobito” Martinez was born in Asuncion, Paraguay’s capital, the

son ofsinger, guitarist, composer, and folklorist Eladio Martinez and Aida

Ayala. He studied piano wdth Margarita Morosoli de Picardo, Nelly Jimenez,

and Pedro Burian, and enrolled in Leonor Aranda’s High Pianistic Studies

Institute. Martinez later received a Fulbright grant to study at the Berklee 

College of Music in Boston. His harmony teachers wrere Luis Canete and

5
Carlos Schwartzman. From 1974 to 1983, he was in the group Los Aftermad’s,

with whom he recorded many ofhis own compositions. In the 1980s he performed classical solo piano recitals and played with the jazz group Opus 572.

In Juego de nihos (Children’s Game), one can hear that Martinez was a precursor to the world music movement, fusing jazz with Paraguayan folk music.

Andre Boucourechliev started his musical career as a pianist, studying 

at the Sofia Conservatory and the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris. In

1951 he earned a licence de concert and began his career as a concert pianist, 

teacher, composer, music critic, and musicologist. Boucourechliev composed primarily with tape recorders and indeterminate elements, such as

electronic filters and envelopes. The series Archipels, written between 1967

and 1972, enhanced his reputation as a composer. The score for Archipel iv

resembles a large navigational chart that contains an “archipelago” of

musical structures, designed as possibilities for the performer to employ.

Debussy’s Six Epigraphes antiques is actually a reworking ofincidental

music he wrote for a single performance of a staged recitation oftwelve of

Pierre Louys’ (1870-1925) Chansons de Bilitis (Songs of Bilitis). In reworking 

the score (for two flutes, two harps, and celesta) for solo piano, Debussy

retained only about half ofthe original music. As might be expected with 

music originally intended to accompany a theatrical presentation, all ofthe

Epigraphes are highly atmospheric. “Pour invoquer Pan, dieu du vent d’ete”

(For Invoking Pan, God ofthe Summer Wind) depicts a languid summer

day. “Pour un tombeau sans nom” (For a Tomb without Name) is a highly

chromatic and subtle elegy. “Pour que la nuit soit propice” (So That the

Night May Be Propitious) is an expressive nocturne in a condensed sonata 

form. “Pour la danseuse aux crotales” (For the Dancer with Castanets)

evokes its eponymous instrumentation with harp-like keyboard figuration. 

“Pour l’Egyptienne” (For the Egyptian Lady) is marked by a particularly 

improvisatory character. The etude-like “Pour remercier la pluie au matin”

(For Thanking the Morning Rain) is dominated by rapid chromatic figuration

accompanied by a wide variety ofmelodic material.

6

Ignacio Cervantes is generally regarded as the leading Cuban composer

ofthe nineteenth century. His output was varied and included orchestral 

and stage works, but he is best known for piano music, particularly Danzas

cubanas and other salon pieces, such as Ilusionesperdidas (Lost Illusions).

From 1859 to 1861, he was a pupil of Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869),

whose lighter, folk-inspired keyboard music became a major influence on

his own compositions. Cervantes enrolled at the Paris Conservatory in 1865

and studied piano with composer and virtuoso pianist Charles-Valentin Alkan

(1813-1888), as well as with piano pedagogue Antoine Francois Marmontel 

(1818-1898). Cervantes returned to Havana in 1870 to present piano recitals

and conduct operas. He soon got into political difficulties, however, and was

expelled. During his exile, Cervantes toured the United States extensively

(1875-1879), and began composing his Danzas cubanas, a process that continued for twenty years (1875-1895).

During the first decade ofthe twentieth century, Maurice Ravel was one

ofthe leading figures in the most extensive expansion ofthe piano’s technical and expressive possibilities since the music of Liszt, and he incorporated

many innovations into his suite Miroirs (Mirrors). As its title suggests, it is a

group ofreflections on various scenes, moments, or personalities. Alborada

del grazioso (The Courtier’s Serenade) is the fourth offive pieces in the suite,

in which Ravel develops Spanish themes into complicated melodic figures.

Progi'am notes by Wilhem Latchoumia