LECTURE BY DAVID GARIFF
CONCERT
Preconcert Talk: 6:00 pm – Auditorium
Concert: 7:00 pm – Atrium
DOORS OPEN FOR CONCERT UNTIL 7 PM
As part of A Celebration of Italian Art, Music and Film, jointly presented by the Italian Cultural Institute and the National Gallery of Art, the November 1st program features a lecture by David Gariff on Post-World War II Italian Art and the Paintings of Franco Sarnari as well as a concert by Enrico Elisi, pianist and Alessandra Marc, soprano, accompanied by Francis Conlon.
PROGRAM
(Performed without intermission)
Nino Rota (1911 – 1979)
From Fifteen Preludes (1964)
No. 6: Andante
No. 4: Andante sostenuto ed espressivo
No. 2: Allegro ma espressivo e delicato
No. 9: Allegretto quasi andantino
No. 10: Allegro mosso e marcato
Franco Cioci (b. 1940)
Foglio d’album (Album Leaf)
Bruno Bettinelli (1913 – 2004)
From Six Bagatelles (1986)
No. 3: Mosso
Armando Gentilucci (1939 – 1989)
From Fragments of an Autumn Diary (1983)
No. 1: Lento
No. 2 [No tempo indication]
Ottorino Respighi (1879 – 1936)
From Six Pieces, P. 44 (1903)
Notturno
Giacinto Scelsi (1905 – 1988)
From Forty Preludes (1930 – 1940)
Prelude no. 5Prelude no. 6
Luciano Berio (1925 – 2003)
Wasserklavier (1965)
Brin (1990)
Riccardo Pick-Mangiagalli (1882 – 1949)
From Deux lunaires (1915)
La Danse d’Olaf
Arturo Toscanini (1867 – 1957)
Primo Bacio (1889)
Text by Luigi Morandi (1844 – 1922)
Toscanini
Sono Sola (1885)
Text by Cesare Cantù (1804 – 1895)
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LOCATION:
Embassy of Italy/Italian Cultural Institute
3000 Whitehaven st Street NW
Washington, DC 20008
ENRICO ELISI
Winner of seven first prizes in national competitions in Italy, pianist Enrico Elisi performs to consistent acclaim throughout the Americas, Asia, and Europe. Recent North American performances include recitals at the Banff Centre for the Arts, the New York Public Library, and Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall. He has also performed in China, Germany, Peru, the Slovak Republic, South Korea, Spain, and Taiwan.
Among the many orchestras that have invited Elisi to perform concertos are those of Florence, Italy and Porto, Portugal as well as the Bay Atlantic Symphony, Greeley Philharmonic, Penn State Philharmonic, Pennsylvania Centre Orchestra, Penn’s Woods Orchestra, and Johns Hopkins Symphony Orchestra. In 2007 he debuted as soloist/conductor with the Green Valley Festival Chamber Orchestra.
In addition to his honors at Italian national competitions, Elisi has won top prizes in the Venice Competition and the Oporto International Competi- tion and received the La Gesse Foundation Fellowship. An active chamber musician, he has collaborated with principal players from the Baltimore, Chicago, and American Symphony Orchestras and has given chamber recitals in China, Korea, France, and Peru. As a champion of new music, Elisi has commissioned works from composers of many nationalities and in 2009 premiered and recorded Paul Chihara’s Images for clarinet, viola, and piano. Elisi founded and directs an international composition competition, which awards the Musica Domani Prize.
A member of the piano faculty of the Eastman School of Music since 2011, he previously taught at Pennsylvania State University and the Univer- sity of Nevada, Las Vegas. A graduate of the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, he studied in his native Italy with Giuseppe Fricelli in
Bologna and earned diplomas from the Conservatory of Florence and the Incontri col Maestro International Piano Academy of Imola.
ALESSANDRA MARC
Dramatic soprano Alessandra Marc has consistently been acclaimed as one of the most outstanding singers of our day. Andrew Porter, writing in The
New Yorker, described her voice as “an instrument of unsurpassed beauty and impact” and “perhaps the richest, fullest, most beautiful big soprano voice around.”
Not long after her first performance at the White House in 1991, Marc was selected by then National Gallery music director George Manos to substitute for ailing soprano Arleen Auger to sing with the National Gallery Orchestra on the occasion of the Gallery’s fiftieth anniversary (and coinci- dentally its 2,000th concert). The resulting performance of Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs was a resounding success with the audience and critics alike. A frequent guest of the world’s leading opera houses and orchestras, Marc collaborated often with the late Giuseppe Sinopoli, for whose funeral mass she sang in 2001 in Rome.
Marc performs the title roles in Aida and Turandot — her signature roles — at major international and United States opera houses. Of her sold-out opening night performance of Aida at the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Times reported: “She displayed burnished tone and enormous volume, especially in climactic phrases that soar above the orchestra and chorus.” Her debut solo album, American Diva, peaked at number thirteen on Billboard maga- zine’s classical charts. She has also recorded Opera Gala with Andrew Litton and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.
Alessandra Marc’s longstanding commitment to her community and to charitable causes most recently included singing at the American Red Cross Tiffany Circle’s annual summit conference in Washington as well as per- forming in the 2011 Flight 93 Memorial Concert in Alexandria, Virginia. She maintains a website at alessandramarc.com.
PROGRAM NOTES
One of the best known and celebrated Italian composers of the twentieth century, Nino Rota grew up surrounded by music — his mother, Ernesta Rinaldi, was a pianist and the daughter of composer Giovanni Rinaldi (1840 – 1895). Young Nino was already composing at age eight, and by age twelve had composed an oratorio—L’infanzia di San Giovanni Battista—that received positive critical reviews and established him as a child prodigy.
After six years of study at various schools in Milan and Rome, he came to the United States on the advice of Arturo Toscanini. At the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia he studied composition with Rosario Scalero and conducting under Fritz Reiner. He formed a friendship with Aaron Copland and discovered American popular song, cinema, and the music of Gershwin.
Upon his return to Italy in the early 1930s, Rota encountered open ani- mosity between innovators and traditionalists (the latter sustained by the mood established by the Fascists who were then in power in Italy). Choosing not to be drawn in by either side in the struggle and inspired by the example of composer Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882 – 1978), Rota developed a style that displayed original characteristics while maintaining an unbroken link with the music of the past. After World War ii, Rota’s career continued in the United States, where film score commissions came his way on a regular basis. He continued, however, to write music for the concert hall and the opera house, with a constant cross-fertilization between the two areas: for a European composer this was an oblique, pioneering approach. In film music he used his eclectic inclinations and treated the boundaries of the film medium as a challenge, thus producing some of the finest music of the genre. Between 1942 and 1952, Rota created the music for sixty films, including Federico Fellini’s (1920 – 1993) I vitelloni, La strada, La dolce vita, 8 1/2, Amarcord, and Il Casanova di Federico Fellini.
Winner of the 2012 Prix Annelie di Man, Franco Cioci composes music for the piano and the harpsichord. A professor at the Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini in Florence, he has also written works for flute, voice, and chamber orchestra.
A graduate of Milan’s Conservatorio di Musica “Giuseppe Verdi,” where he studied piano, choral singing, conducting, and composition, Bruno Bettinelli won the Accademia di Santa Cecilia prize in 1941 and the Busoni prize in 1955. His career centered in Milan, where he taught composition at the conservatory from 1938 to 1979. His earlier music has as its model the neoclassical approach of Paul Hindemith (1895 – 1963). By the time he wrote his Six Bagatelles in 1986, he had gone through periods in which he aban- doned tonality for atonal chromaticism, adopted some techniques from Anton Webern (1883 – 1945), experimented with electronic music, and returned to a neo-Hindemithian emphasis on constructive rigor and communication with the listener.
Another composer trained at the Milan Conservatory, Armando Gentilucci studied piano, choral music, and conducting as well as composition. He taught at the conservatories in Bolzano and Milan from 1964 to 1969, when he became director of the Istituto Musicale in Reggio nell’Emilia. Much influenced by the music of Luigi Nono (1924 – 1990), Gentilucci was con cerned with synthesizing timbre, harmony, and melody, out of which he derived a compositional process that evolves from moment to moment.
His approach could embrace echoes from the past (contrapuntal techniques, quotations, quasi-tonal centers) as much as avant-garde procedures and sounds, while retaining a coherent structure. His 1978 essay Oltre l’avanguardia: un invito al molteplice (Beyond the Avant-garde, an Invitation to Multiplicity) became a reference point of musical theory for Italian composers in the 1980s.
Made famous by the orchestral music that he wrote in middle age, Ottorino Respighi spent the early years of his career writing chamber and vocal works and a number of chamber operas. When he was in his early twenties, he made several trips to Russia to study under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844 – 1908), who inspired him to raise his sights to creating music for symphony orchestra. The first large-scale orchestral suite with which Respighi gained international recognition was Fontane di Roma
(Fountains of Rome, 1914 – 1916), followed nine years later by Pini di Roma (Pines of Rome, 1923 – 1924). Known for their picturesque, sparkling orches- tration, his orchestral suites began after 1925 to reflect his new-found interest in early music, with Vetrate di chiesa (Stained-Glass Windows, 1925), which uses fragments of Gregorian chant, and Gli uccelli (The Birds, 1927), based on bird pieces by Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683 – 1754) and other baroque composers. Respighi also contributed to the repertoire of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with La Boutique fantasque (The Magic Toy Shop), which he arranged in 1919 from pieces by Gioacchino Rossini (1792 – 1868).
Giacinto Scelsi’s extraordinary life encompassed most of the twentieth century and embraced many aspects of its intellectual, spiritual, and social upheavals. Born in 1905 into southern Italian aristocracy and inheriting the title Conte d’Alaya Valva, he travelled extensively, moving within Europe’s most elevated social circles. Scelsi’s early development as a composer was a progression through some of the principal aesthetic tendencies of twentieth- century music — futurism, neoclassicism, dodecaphony, surrealism — influenced along the way by periods of private study with Respighi and pupils of
Aleksandr Skriabin (1872 – 1915) and Arnold Schoenberg (1874 – 1951), and by his friendship with the poet Paul Éluard (1895 – 1952) and Salvador Dalí (1904 – 1989). Exiled to Switzerland during World War ii — he was married to a relative of the British Royal Family at the time — Scelsi returned to Rome in 1945 and spent the rest of his life there in relative seclusion, writing music that is characterized by obsessive reiteration of individual sounds and is organized in movements that do not provide contrast, but rather offer a repeated re-examination of the same sound object. His work was largely ignored by Italian performers and the general public until the 1970s, when composers Alvin Curran (American, b. 1938) and Horatiu Radulescu (Romanian, 1942 – 2008) discovered Scelsi’s work and began to promote it. In Scelsi they found an established body of work with approaches to composi- tion that they were just beginning to explore.
Born into a family of composers, Luciano Berio first studied music with his father, before attending the Milan Music Academy. In 1951 he traveled to the United States to study serial methods with Luigi Dallapiccola (1904 – 1975) at Tanglewood. The Stravinsky-like neoclassicism of his early works was replaced in the 1950s by a graceful serial manner, well shown in Chamber Music for soprano and instrumental trio (1952). As his style developed further, he created music of complex, superposed serial structures, such as Chemins II (1967) for viola and nine other instruments or Kol-Od (1996) for trumpet and chamber ensemble. When Berio composed Wasserklavier in 1965, he had just accepted a post at the Juilliard School of Music that he was to occupy for the next six years. Although primarily concerned with the teach- ing of composition and analysis, he also founded the Juilliard Ensemble, which promoted the performance of contemporary music. Both Wasserklavier and Brin, composed twenty-five years apart demonstrate Berio’s uncanny ability to derive an abundance of interesting detail from a strictly limited palette of melodic and harmonic parameters.
Born in Bohemia, Riccardo Pick-Mangiagalli was a two-year-old when his family relocated to Milan. From 1896 to 1903, he studied at the Milan Conservatory of Music. After taking on further studies in Vienna and creat- ing a career as a pianist in Italy and Austria, he returned to Milan to direct its conservatory and concentrate on teaching and composition. As a com- poser he excelled in light ballet music. Il carillon magico, Pick-Mangiagalli’s most successful stage work, shows his highly individual style, which fea- tures frequent unrelated triads, chromatic slithers, and unusually placed augmented triads and diminished seventh chords. His tendency to alternate between gentle nocturnal contemplation and sparkling mercurial exuberance is exemplified by the two piano pieces titled Deux lunaires. The second of the two,“La Danse d’Olaf,” is unmistakably the exuberant member of that pair.
Known to the world as an inspiring conductor renowned for his inten- sity, perfectionism, and attention to orchestral detail as well as his photo- graphic memory, Arturo Toscanini began writing songs for solo voice and piano or orchestra during his student days, well before his path to a career as a conductor was clear. Carrying forward the tradition of the canzoni da camera established by Vincenzo Bellini (1801 – 1835), Gaetano Donizetti (1797 – 1848), and Giuseppe Verdi (1813 – 1901), the songs introduce the impassioned romanticism found later in the art songs of Pietro Mascagni (1863 – 1945), Puccini, and Respighi. Once it became clear to him that conducting was his destiny (following a life-changing experience while attending an 1888 performance of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde in Bologna), Toscanini abandoned composition and even tried to prevent widespread distribution of his songs. Until quite recently, they were unknown to the concert-going public, and this is the first time they are being performed in Washington, dc.
Alessandra Marc performs two of the songs of Arturo Toscanini on tonight’s program and plans to record all twenty of them in the near future.
Program notes by Stephen Ackert, head, music department, National Gallery of Art
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