For the convenience of concertgoers 

the Garden Cafe remains open until 6:oo pm.

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.

Music Department

National Gallery ofArt

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue nw

Washington, DC

Mailing address

2000B South Club Drive

Landover, md 20785

www.nga.gov

The Sixty-seventh Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery of Art

2,729th Concert

Foundling Baroque Orchestra

Presented in honor of

Luis Melendez: Master ofthe Spanish Still Life

May 17, 2009

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Admissionfree
Foundling Baroque Orchestra

Pamela Murray, soprano

Dana Maiben, violin and music director

Lisa Brooke, violin

Martha Perry and Anna Griffis, violin and viola

Elisabeth Le Guin, principal cello and music advisor

Margaret Cushing, cello and artistic director

Motomi Igarashi, double bass

Meg Owens and Sarah Weiner, oboe

Linda Dempf and Paul Hopkins, natural horn

Anna Marsh, bassoon

David Walker, guitar

Program

Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805)

Sinfonia 1 in D, G 490 (1765)

Allegro

Andante grazioso

Allegro assai

Gaetano Brunetti (1744-1798)

Andante “de fagotto obligato”

Bias de Laserna (1751-1816)

Tonadilla: “Las musicas”

Comienzo: Allegro; Allegro; Boleras; Allegretto 

Coplas: Allegro no mucho

Marcha -Cojea -Musica funeraria -Boleras-Allegro -

Cencerros- Fandango -Salida del toro-Zorongo

Final: Allegro

INTERMISSION

Boccherini

Notturno no. 4 in Gfor Octet, Opus 38, G 470 (1787)

Andantino amoroso ma non largo

Minuetto

Finale: Allegro vivo

Boccherini

Aria Accademica: Care luci, che regnate, G 549
The Musicians

The Foundling Baroque Orchestra and Women’s Advocacy Project combines

virtuosity, scholarship, and a collaborative working process with a commitment to advancing public awareness ofwomen and children in need. Having

this dual mission, Foundling is proud to be affiliated this season with the 

Rhode Island Coalition against Domestic Violence. Foundling brings the 

magic and excitement ofseventeenth- and eighteenth-century music to life

for twenty-first-century audiences. Tonight’s performance marks the orchestra’s Washington, DC, debut.

The ensemble takes its name and inspiration from the girls and women

of eighteenth-century Venice’s Ospedale della Pieta, home to the city’s

orphaned and abandoned girl children, who were given an honored place

in civic life through an arts program that was unrivaled in its time. Antonio 

Vivaldi, who taught and composed at the Pieta, wrote many of his most

beloved compositions for this orchestra, which became the premier musical

ensemble in a supremely musical city, supported itself and the orphanage

with its music, and attracted acclaim throughout Europe.

Foundling has presented five seasons of concerts in Providence, Rhode

Island, and numerous summer concerts on Cape Cod, featuring members

of the ensemble and distinguished guests as soloists. Artists-in-residence 

include recorder virtuoso Marion Verbruggen, natural trumpeter Kris Kwapis,

and soprano Pamela Murray, who join the ensemble regularly and participate in the group’s artistic leadership. A Live in Concert compilation recording will be released later this year.

5
Program Notes

Musical life in Madrid during the time of Luis Melendez (1715-1780) was a

rich and varied affair. The Italian style was all the rage at court and in the 

opera house, and Italian and Viennese chamber music was fashionable. The 

public theaters offered a little bit of everything, from the occasional opera 

to traditional Spanish regional songs and dances. Tonight’s program reflects

this mixed culture with music by two Italians and one Spaniard: Luigi

Boccherini, Gaetano Brunetti, and Bias de Laserna, three of Melendez’s

contemporaries who made their careers in Spain and contributed to the 

musical life ofmid-to-late eighteenth-century Madrid.

The most widely known ofthe three is Boccherini. Like Melendez,

Boccherini worked for much of his career without consistent royal commissions for his compositions. Many artists and composers ofthis generation

relied on sporadic patronage and often sold their work by the piece to earn

a living. Both Melendez and Boccherini specialized in “small works”: Melendez in the still life, Boccherini in chamber music. Both essayed works in 

the larger, more prestigious forms, but commissions were elusive. Melendez

had painted at least forty-four still-lifes for the Prince ofthe Asturias, (later

Carlos iv) but was never granted a court position. Carlos, who was a violinist,

engaged Boccherini occasionally at court, but the king’s own ensembles were

dominated by the Brunetti family and had no permanent place for Boccherini.

Luigi Boccherini was born into a family ofmusicians in Lucca, Italy, in

1743. By age fifteen he was well on the way to making a name for himself

as a composer and a cellist. A Florentine diarist noted in 1761 that the young 

“celebre suonatore di Violoncello” (celebrated violoncellist) was greeted 

with well-earned applause for a concert “of a completely new kind of music. ”

Boccherini composed in virtually every Italian genre of his day, and pioneered in a new one—the string quintet. In 1767, the year in which his first

6

published works appeared, he began a concert tour that took him, via Paris,

to Spain, where he stayed for the rest of his life. In Spain he found work

in an Italian opera company that prospered under royal patronage. When 

Boccherini arrived in Madrid in 1768, he certainly brought with him his 

Sinfonia 1, composed three years earlier. A version ofit was used as the overture for an opera by Nicolo Piccinini, La buona figliuola maritata, introducing

Boccherini as a composer to the Spanish audience. Like contemporary symphonies by Haydn, it is scored for strings, oboes and horns, and is full of

youthful exuberance and good humor.

Bom in Italy, Gaetano Brunetti moved to Madrid in 1762 at age eighteen; 

in 1767 he was employed as a violinist in the royal chapel in the service of

Carlos hi and remained in royal service for the rest of his life, becoming 

Maestro de musica de camera for Carlos iv. Working on an exclusive contract 

to a royal family often precluded publication; most of Brunetti’s music was

never published in his lifetime and still remains unpublished. The Andante

“de fagotto obligato” is taken from a quintet for bassoon and strings by Brunetti.

This movement is a songful, even operatic, aria for solo bassoon, accompanied by and in alternation with the strings. Perhaps one can hear in this 

opera-seria-style work a not-so-distant musical ancestor ofthe tango.

Tonada and tonadilla are terms that have been in continuous use in

Hispanic music since the sixteenth century; the terms have always referred

to many different genres and practices, varying with time, context and place.

In the later eighteenth century in Madrid, a tonadilla was a comic musical 

interlude for singer(s) and small orchestra, presented between acts of a play

or opera. Over time, the genre became a formal repository for disappearing

elements of Spanish folk music. Some tonadillas feature attitudes, melodies, 

and rhythms borrowed from traditional styles, particularly those ofthe boleras,

fandango, folia, jota, seguidilla, tirana, zorongo, and other Spanish dances.

7
Bias de Laserna specialized in tonadillas; he wrote at least 700, as well as

music to plays, melodramas, and imported opera libretti, making him one 

ofthe most prolific composers ofthe eighteenth century. Born in Navarra,

Spain, by 1774 he had found his way to Madrid in his early twenties and was

writing music for the theater. He served as music director for the Teatro de

la Cruz for nearly twenty years beginning in 1790, but by the end ofthat

period he had also taken on various teaching and music copying jobs. Most

of his work was never published and survives in manuscript copies in the 

municipal library in Madrid. Foundling’s principal cellist and musical

advisor Elisabeth Le Guin has made the tonadillas of Bias de Laserna a focus

ofstudy and has provided this edition of “Las Musicas.”

The tonadilla “Las Musicas” is in three main sections. In the first the 

singer plays with the audience to get its attention, complains about having 

to perform at all, and summarizes the novel devices she will use to entertain

her listeners and to keep herselffrom being bored. In the second part, the 

coplas, she carries out her promise; Laserna has written a series of clever,

short instrumental character sketches that refer to common middle-class

vices of the day. Each sketch is introduced by a briefsung description ofthe 

vice involved. This patchwork is further varied by two interludes in which 

the singer breaks offto address the audience directly, saying, in effect, “If

you don’t like what you’re hearing, then change your ways!” The Final

unleashes all ofthe composer’s (and singer’s) virtuoso capabilities in a

fabulous display of coloratura and bravura.

Though just as amiable in nature as his early symphony, Boccherini’s

Notturno is of an entirely different character. It is a much more sophisticated, 

dynamic, and expressive work, full of textural detail and rich tonal coloring.

For this work, Boccherini has added three winds to his “signature” ensemble, the string quintet with two cellos. This is Boccherini at his lyrical best—

intimate, generous, conversational, suave.

The aria accademica features a text by Metastasio, set by Francesco

Bartolomeo Conti in his opera Issipile (1732). In the opera, the aria is given to

Jason, who bids a wistful farewell to his sweetheart as he sets sail with the 

Argonauts. Composers in Boccherini’s time often rewrote a single aria from 

an opera by another composer, and included it in the performances of that 

opera when they were conducting. Boccherini’s setting was likely written for

his wife, who was an opera singer, and intended for performance at a Spanish

salon or academy modeled after the famous Arcadian Academy in Rome.

In 1770 Boccherini received an appointment to the service ofthe Infante

Don Luis in Aranjuez. This gave him a steady income and encouragement

for his creative work until the Infante’s death in 1785, the same year his wife

died. Shortly thereafter, King Carlos ill granted him a pension considerably

smaller than his earnings had been. For most ofthe rest of his life, Boccherini’s income came largely from the sale of his compositions to his Paris

publishers and a patchwork of private patronage. The European popular 

market for chamber music welcomed Boccherini’s sonorous, sensuous

music. Like Melendez, Boccherini’s artistry lay in capturing the intricacy of a

moment in lustrous and intimate detail, in music that is at once deceptively

direct and technically accomplished.

Program notes by Dana Maiben and Elisabeth Le Guin
Upcoming Concerts at the National Gallery of Art

No Concert on Sunday, May 24, 2009

National Gallery Chamber Orchestra

Vladimir Lande, guest conductor

Stephen Ackert, harpsichord

Music by J. S. Bach, Schnittke, and Tchaikowsky

May 31, 2009

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court