75TH SEASON
Alliage Quintett. Photo by Ira Weinrauch - Weinrauch Fotografie

2 • National Gallery of Art

PROGRAM

3:30 • West Building, East Garden Court

Alliage Quintett

Daniel Gauthier, soprano saxophone

Koryun Asatryan, alto saxophone

Simon Hanrath, tenor saxophone

Sebastian Pottmeier, baritone saxophone

Jang Eun Bae, piano

With guest Nurit Bar-Josef, violin

Dancing Paris

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)

Overture from Candide

Arr. Itai Sobol

Darius Milhaud (1892-1974)

Le Boeufsur le toit

Arr. Sebastian Gottschick

Jun Nagao (b. 1964)

Rhapsody on Carmen (Bizet)

Intermission

George Gershwin (1898-1937)

An American in Paris

Arr. Sylvain Dedenon 

Allegretto grazioso

Andante ma con ritmo deciso

Erik Satie (1866-1925)

Gymnopedie no. 1

Arr. Sebastian Pottmeier

George Enescu (1881-1955)

Romanian Rhapsody no. 1, op. 11

Arr. Sebastian Gottschick

75th Season • 3
The Musicians

The Alliage Quintett is one of Europe's most creative and successful saxophone ensembles.

Atliage — the French word for alloy— refers to the saxophone as an alloy of copper and zinc.

Similarly, the musicians carry this blend into the diversity of styles and eras of music they

perform. In a broader sense, alliage stands for the musical ideal of the five musicians forming

one homogeneous whole and for their perfectly balanced playing.

The quintet was founded by Daniel Gauthier, currently the only professor for classical

saxophone in Germany (Hochschule fur Musik, Cologne) and the ensemble's leader and

soprano sax player. He is joined by three of today's best soloists on saxophone: Koryun

Asatryan, alto, Simon Hamrath, tenor, and Sebastian Pottmeier, baritone. The quintet is completed by the Korean pianist Jang Eun Bae, an experienced and well-versed chamber musician.

The quintet's core repertoire consists of well-known masterpieces of all epochs,

cleverly arranged for the ensemble with exceptional sensitivity. With its unique programs,

the Alliage Quintett performs successfully as it straddles the fine line between subtle chamber music and sophisticated entertainment. It fills major concert halls throughout the world,

and in June 2015, the quintet was honored to perform the opening concert at the World

Saxophone Congress in Strasbourg, France.

In addition to several radio broadcastings, the Alliage Quintett has released five CDs,

one of which — Una voce poco fa — received the renowned ECHO Klassik award in 2005.

On their second CD, A la recherche du reve perdu, the five musicians traveled back in time

to Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxophone, to confront his instrument with works of his

contemporaries Mendelssohn and Schumann. Masquerade, with arrangements of J. S. Bach

and recompositions of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, was released on SONY Classical. The group's

Voyage Russe recording was released, also for SONY, with a musical focus on the Belle Epoque 

Russe and was accompanied by an extensive European concert tour. The ensemble again won

the renowned ECHO Klassik award in 2014 for their fourth release, Dancing Paris. In February

2016, the quintet released their new CD Fantasia with the renowned clarinetist Sabine Meyer

as guest, featuring works by Borodin, Stravinsky, Bernstein, Shostakovich, and Dukas.

4 * National Gallery of Art

Program

Dancing Paris

The starting point of the libretto of Leonard Bernstein's Candide was no less a work than

Voltaire's satirical tale Candide, ou I'Optimisme. Its overture is one of the composer's most

frequently heard works in the concert hall. Both in the original and in the arrangement for

the Alliage Quintett, the score moves easily between light music and its more serious

counterpart, adopting a tone that is by turn lively, virtuosic, and witty. The present arrangement is by Itai Sobol, who particularly values the Alliage saxophones' ability "to play delicate

lines, something we rarely hear from these instruments on such a high level of attainment.

But they can also sound like powerful brass instruments, notably in the first few bars of the

piece.'' The piano underpins and extends the range of possibilities inherent in the instruments' sonorities, while also defining the work's rhythmic contours, imitating a harp, and in

its highest register taking over the quiet and virtuosic figures of the original, which it does

to impressive effect.

At its first performance in 1956, Bernstein's operetta failed to impress audiences, a

problem due less to its music than to its libretto. A revised version laid greater emphasis on 

the songs and, reworked as a musical, it proved a hit on Broadway. Voltaire's ironic tale about

"the best of all possible worlds" was intended as a bitter satire of German philosopher Gottfried

Wilhelm Leibniz's optimistic world view. As soon as it was published, Candide was placed on

the Vatican's list of proscribed texts, and in many places it was banned completely because

of the absurd humor of his literary source. Bernstein succeeded in creating a witty survey of

the European musical tradition with his caricatures of potpourri overtures to comic operas,

Bach chorales, and coloratura showpieces.

Between the two great world fairs of 1889 and 1900 in Paris, the city experienced

stormy times — political, social, and economic —which coincidded with the cultural heyday

of the Belle Epoque. The opulent shows at the Moulin Rouge and the Lido set a new benchmark for revue drama, while cultural life on the Seine vibrated in the opera houses and theaters,

and productions at the Theatre des Champs Elysees were regularly surrounded by scandal.

This was an era of lightness before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. A new sensuality

of sound evolved in music: composers played with elements of jazz and folk and light music,

making use of classical forms that were then robbed of their strictness by alienation and

parody. Bold harmonies characterize the compositions of the time as much as crazy changes

of tempo and complex rhythms. Musicians, poets, and painters met regularly in restaurants

and bistros to share the new-found artistic freedom, which was derived from the search for

a new feeling of simplicity, combining everyday life with the refinement of earlier eras.

No less lively than Enescu's Rhapsody is Le Boeufsur le toit (The ox on the roof) by 

Darius Milhaud. This fantasy for orchestra dates from 1919, and was originally composed as

accompanying music for a silent film. It became a huge hit through the pantomime performed

by Jean Cocteau. Shortly after the premiere, a cafe of the same name opened in Paris and

became a popular artists' meeting place; to this day, there is a restaurant of this name near

the Champs-Elysees where live jazz is played. Le Boeufsur le toit is basically a dashing rondo

based on a Brazilian folk song that Milhaud learned during his time as cultural attache in

Brazil. Sebastian Gottschick used all of Milhaud's three versions for his arrangement: the

original orchestral version, the Cinema-Fantasie for violin and orchestra with a cadenza by

75th Season • 5
Arthur Honegger, and the piano score. But Gottschick didn't interfere with the basic form of

the piece: the rondo theme appears fourteen times in all twelve keys, and nearly all the intermezzi are left unchanged. But he does play cleverly with superimposition, very much in the

spirit of the original film-music idea. Thus, he takes a passage from Honegger's cadenza,

to quote one example, abbreviates the theme, dovetails it with the section that follows, and

lets it creep early on and in 4/8 time into triple time. The result is a lively and lighthearted

arrangement that takes up the ideas of the time, and in particular, of the Groupe des Six (Les 

Six). This group of French composers was given its name by the journalist Henri Collet in 1918

and was made up of the composers Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Louis Durey, Georges

Auric, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre, plus their "mentors" Jean Cocteau and Erik

Satie. The members of the group were united by their search for an anti-Romantic, antiWagnerian music that had its roots in everyday life. At the time, the self-taught Satie was

causing a sensation in the cabarets of Paris's Montmartre district with his uninhibited style

of piano playing. He quoted light music without reservation, adding cheeky discords to

make it unfamiliar and incorporating fashionable dances like the foxtrot and the waltz into

his compositions.

George Gershwin's An American in Paris gives a vivid impression of how Paris probably

sounded around 1928. With this brilliant composition, he transports the listener to this charming

and exciting city, which he explored himself on an extensive tour through Europe. We hear

the honking of car horns as well as the jazz and dance music pouring forth from the cafes and 

cabarets. The arrangement played here comes from the pen of Sylvain Dedenon. He, too,

does not interfere with the structure of the work, but nonetheless manages to successfully

transfer the energy of the orchestral writing and the colorful instrumentation of Gershwin's

original to the Alliage Quintett. To achieve this, he exploits the full tonal range of the saxophones.

The piano is given much more than simply accompanying duties, making all the facets and 

colors of the original audible.

Erik Satie originally wrote his Gymnopedies between 1888 and 1890 as piano pieces.

Today they are familiar to many people, thanks in part to film and TV. The exact meaning of

Satie's titles is unknown, but they elicit associations with the mysteries of classical antiquity.

George Enescu composed his famous Romanian Rhapsody no. 1 in Paris in 1901, making

use of a good dose of folk melodies from his native Romania. Enescu himself claimed that

he had simply thrown a handful of harmonies together, nothing more. But a look at his sketches

reveals how meticulously the composer, at the tender age of nineteen, fiddled around with

the orchestration of the Rhapsody. In his arrangement for saxophone quartet, piano, and

violin, Sebastian Gottschick sticks as closely to the orchestral score as possible and at the

same time highlights the unusual instrumental line-up. Gottschick comments: "For much of

the time, the Rhapsody's melodies are dictated by the first violin, so that the responsibilities

are clearly allocated for the most part: the first violin on one side and on the other the gypsy

band, from which different soloists regularly step into the limelight. For this variety of voices,

which is not genuinely polyphonic but nevertheless very colorful, the saxophone quartet and

the piano, which often takes the role of the cymbal or the harp, are perfectly suited."

Program notes by Franziska Franke, translated by Clive Williams

6 • National Gallery of Art

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John Kilkenny, percussion

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Music by Nick Didkovsky, Stephen Gorbos,

Osvaldo Golijov, and Marc Mellits

April 12,12:10

East Building Auditorium

Eya

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Presented in honor of Della Robbia:

Sculpting with Color in Renaissance Florence

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West Building, West Garden Court

The Sarajevo Haggadah: Music of the Book

Merima Kljuco's multimedia work for

accordion, piano, and video

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East Building Auditorium

Musical Dialogues: An Exploration of Hope

April 16, 3:00

West Building, East Garden Court

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Music by Polina Nazaykinskaya,

Sergei Prokofiev, and Dmitri Shostakovich

April 19,12:10

West Building, East Garden Court

General Information

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.

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The department of music produced these

program notes. Copyright © 2017 Board of

Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Cover Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Marcelle

Lender Dancing the Bolero in "Chilperic" (detail),

1895-1896, National Gallery of Art, Washington,

Collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney

Back cover West Building, Constitution

Avenue entrance, viewed from Sixth Street NW,

1941, National Gallery of Art, Washington,

Gallery Archives

East Coast Chamber Orchestra

Music by Caplet, Lutosfawski, Suk,

and Theofanidis

April 23, 3:30

West Building, East Garden Court