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 for light refreshments

until 6:00 pm on Sundays.

Music Department

National Gallery of Art

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue nw

Washington, DC

www.nga.gov

cover: Louis Leopold Boilly, Le Songe de Tartini, 1824, Bibliotheque National de France

The Seventieth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery ofArt

2,855th Concert

Alexander Markov, violinist

Heike Doerr, pianist

November 13, 2011

Sunday, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Admissionfree
Program

Giuseppe Tartini (1692-1770)

Sonata in G Minor “Devil’s Trill” (1713)

Arranged by Fritz Kreisler

Larghetto

Allegro energico

Grave; Allegro assai

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Partita no. 2 in D Minorfor Solo Violin, BWV 1004 (1717-1723)

Allemanda

Corrente

Sarabanda

Giga 

Ciaccona

INTERMISSION

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Sonata in E Minorfor Violin and Piano, KV 304 (1778)

Allegro

Tempo di menuetto

Niccolo Paganini (1782-1840)

Selected Caprices for solo violin, op. 1 (1802-1817)

Paganini

Le Streghe, op. 8 (Witches’ Dance)

George Gershwin (1898-1937)

Three Preludes (1926)

Arranged for violin and piano by Albert Markov 

Allegro ben ritmato e deciso

Andante con moto e poco rubato

Allegro ben ritmato e deciso

Gershwin

Porgy and Bess Rhapsody

Arranged for violin and piano by Albert Markov
The Musicians

ALEXANDER MARKOV

Recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1987, violinist Alexander

Markov made his New York debut recital at Carnegie Hall. A Gold Medal 

winner ofthe Paganini International Violin Competition, he has appeared

as soloist with some ofthe world’s most celebrated orchestras, including the

bbc Symphony, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Detroit Symphony, Montreal

Symphony, Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, and Philadelphia Orchestra.

Markov has worked with conductors Ivan Fischer and Neeme Jarvi as well as

pianist Martha Argerich, and has recorded six CDs for the Erato label. He is

featured in The Art ofthe Violin, an internationally acclaimed film that examines the lives of great violinists, recently released on dvd by Warner Vision

International. Markov’s composition Rock Concerto, written in collaboration

with James V. Remington, features the violinist with his rock band, accompanied by symphony orchestra and chorus. When performing this concerto,

Markov plays a newly patented, one-of-a-kind electric violin that has a much

larger dynamic range than the acoustic violin.

Born in Moscow, Markov studied violin with his father, concert violinist

Albert Markov. By the time Alexander was eight years old, he was already

appearing as a soloist with orchestras and performing double concertos with

his father. A United States citizen since 1982, Alexander Markov appears by

arrangement with Lisa SapinkopfArtists, www.chambermuse.com. He maintains a website at www.alexandermarkov.com.

HEIKE DOERR

Born in Germany, Heike Doerr began piano lessons at age five. She made

her first appearances as a soloist with orchestra nine years later, performing

a Bach concerto with the Saliergymnasium Waiblingen Orchestra, followed 

by other appearances with various European orchestras including the Stuttgart

Viva Musica Orchestra, the Krakow Chamber Orchestra, and Chamber

Orchestra Waiblingen. A graduate ofthe Stuttgart Musikhochschule, she

studied piano under Gunter Louegk and Konrad Richter. A veteran ofnumerous solo recitals in France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States,

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Doerr has participated in the Arkandor Foundation Music Festival in Canada

and the Rondo Bennington Music Festival in Vermont. In addition to this

concert, Heike Doerr and Alexander Markov will perform at Wigmore Hall, 

London, as well as at venues in Cyprus and Mexico.

Program Notes

Giuseppe Tartini received his basic musical training, including violin

instruction, as a novice in a Franciscan monastery. While still a teenager, he

left the monastery to study law at the University of Padua, where he supported himself by taking on violin students. In 1710, at age eighteen, he

eloped with one of his students, gravely angering her uncle, the Archbishop

of Padua, who charged Tartini with abduction and ordered his arrest. The

young violinist fled Padua, and hid in a monastery in Assisi for two years, 

during which time he studied composition and continued to hone his skills 

as a violinist. By 1721, with his reputation secure, he was offered the post of

Maestro di Cappella at the Basilica di Sant’ Antonio in Padua. Since the archbishop was by that time too old and feeble to press charges, and the basilica

offered Tartini a contract that allowed him to concertize wherever and whenever he wished, he decided to risk returning to Padua, the scene ofhis “crime.”

A prolific composer—350 ofhis works survive—Tartini started a violin school 

that attracted students from all over Europe. In the case of his most famous

work, the Violin Sonata in G Minor (“Devil’s Trill”), there is a legend, perpetrated by the composer, that the devil came to him one night in a dream

and played this piece for him. The following day Tartini transcribed it from

memory. The legend is apocryphal, but the fiendishly difficult trilled passages in the last movement are truly devilish.

A set ofsix works comprised ofthree sonate da chiesa (church sonatas)

and three partitas, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonatas and Partitasfor Solo

Violin, BWV 1001-1006, represent the zenith of polyphonic writing for a

non-keyboard instrument. The sublime and eloquent Partita no. 2 in D Minor,

BWV 1004, seems for the most part to follow the conventional outline ofthe

baroque suite, opening with an earnest and purposeful Allemanda, and

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continuing with a Corrente and a Sarabanda, whose brief coda furnishes the 

link with the succeeding Giga. The most spectacular feature ofthis partita is

the final movement, Bach’s famous Ciaconna—the longest and most challenging single movement ever written for an unaccompanied string instrument. Often performed on its own as a free-standing work, it has been widely

transcribed for other instruments.

Mozart’s early violin sonatas are his first published works. Designated 

in the score as sonatas “for piano and violin,” they differ markedly from the 

violin sonatas ofthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries in that the piano 

dominates. The violin functions as an obbligato, accompanying or ornamenting the piano part and often duplicating the melody. Ofthe nineteen

sonatas for piano and violin by Mozart, eighteen are straightforward, classical in nature, and in a major key. In this concert, Alexander Markov plays

the lone sonata written in minor key, K. 304, which Mozart composed under

somber circumstances. During the concert season 1777-1778, he was

engaged to play a tour of Paris with his sister, but their mother, Anna Maria

Pertl, died offever just as the tour began. Grieving, Mozart was moved to

write this sonata, and the two young musicians played it on their continuing

tour as a memorial to their mother. The melancholy that pervades the work

appears at this point for the first time in Mozart’s music, and does not

reappear until late in his career.

Because Nicolo Paganini was a superstar violinist first and a composer

second, his music has often been slighted for lack of profundity. Among 

violinists, however, mastery ofthe Caprices, op. 1, represents the summit of

technical achievement; this opus stands as one ofthe greatest volumes of

music ever devised for a solo string instrument. Although primarily intended as technical exercises, the caprices are so wide-ranging in their scope that

they transcend all expected pedagogic constraints, and possess unique

entertainment as well as instructional value. Le Streghe is a set of variations, 

originally written for violin and orchestra, featuring some of Paganini’s most

virtuosic pyrotechnics. It is based on a melody he heard in Franz Xaver

Siissmayr’s (1766-1803) ballet Die Zauberschwestern im Beneventer Walde

(The Enchantresses in the Beneventer Woods).

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Published in 1926, George Gershwin’s Three Preludes are an excellent

example ofthe influence ofjazz on early twentieth-century classical music. 

Originally intended as the first three oftwenty-four preludes for piano, they 

have been arranged for many instrumental combinations. Arias and melodies from Gershwin’s opera, Porgy and Bess, have also inspired numerous

instrumental arrangements, attesting to the long-lasting appeal ofthis truly 

American masterpiece.

Program notes by Danielle DeSwert Hahn

Next week at the National Gallery ofArt

Alexandre Dossin, pianist

Stephen Ackert, organist

Music of Franz Liszt

November 16, 2011

Wednesday, 12:10 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

National Gallery ofArt Orchestra

Music by Barber, Bernstein,

Ives, and Leshnoff

November 20, 2011

Sunday, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

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