Concert at National Gallery of Art
A concert by Federico Agostini, violinist, and Enrico Elisi, pianist. Agostini is world-renowned as a recitalist, chamber musician, and concertmaster (1979-2002) of the legendary Italian string ensemble I Musici Italiani and Enrico Elisi is the winner of nine first prizes in international competitions in Italy, Portugal and the United States.
The program features music by Ottorino Respighi, Luigi Dallapiccola and Gian Francesco Malipiero, composers who lived through the unsettling World War I period in Italy and its equally traumatic aftermath.
cosponsored by
ABOUT THE IMAGE: Angelo Rognoni, Avanzata sul Carso (Advance on the Carso), 1917, black and colored ink with graphite on wove paper, National Gallery of Art, Eugene L. and Marie-Louise Garbáty Fund and the Mr. and Mrs. Louis Glickfield Fund
RSVP
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Admittance is on a first-come, first-seated basis, beginning 30 minutes before each concertEntrance at 6th Street and Constitution Avenue NW FOR MORE INFO: CLICK HERE
LOCATION
National Gallery of Art
West Building, West Garden Court
Washington, DC
MORE INFO
FEDERICO AGOSTINI
World-renowned as a recitalist, chamber musician, and concertmaster (1979–2002) of the legendary Italian string ensemble I Musici Italiani, Federico Agostini studied violin at the Conservatory of Music in his native Trieste, Italy; in Venice; and at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, where Salvatore Accardo and Franco Gulli were among his teachers. Having made his debut as a soloist at age sixteen, Agostini has appeared in prominent international music festivals in Europe, Japan, and the United States, and has performed chamber music with many distinguished artists, including Bruno Giuranna, Jaime Laredo, Joseph Silverstein, and Janos Starker as well as with members of the American, Emerson, Fine Arts, Tokyo, and Guarneri string quartets. In 2004 he joined violinist Yosuke Kawasaki, violist James Creitz, and cellist Sadao Harada to found the D’Amici String Quartet.
Agostini’s recordings on the Philips label include Bach and Vivaldi violin concertos as well as The Four Seasons, which was filmed on location in Venice and is available on DVD. More recent recordings include Gabriel Fauré’s piano quartets and a selection of favorite virtuoso violin pieces published by Live Notes in Japan.
A member of the Eastman School of Music faculty since 2012, Agostini has taught at the Conservatories of Venice and Trieste, Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, and at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Trossingen, Germany. He has conducted master classes at the Orford Art Center in Canada and the Round Top Festival Hill Institute in Texas, as well as in Australia, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, and Sweden.
ENRICO ELISI
Winner of nine first prizes in international competitions in Italy, Portugal, and the United States, 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 Italian Embassy in Washington, 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, Penn’s Woods, and Johns Hopkins Symphony orchestras. In 2007 he debuted as soloist/conductor with the Green Valley, Nevada, Festival Chamber Orchestra.
The recipient of a La Gesse Foundation Fellowship, Elisi is an active chamber musician, having collaborated with principal players from the Baltimore, Chicago, and American Symphony Orchestras and performed chamber recitals in China, Korea, France, and Peru. A champion of new music, Elisi has commissioned works from composers of many nationalities. In 2009 he premiered and recorded Paul Chihara’s Images for clarinet, viola, and piano, and he 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, Elisi is a graduate of the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. He also studied in his native Bologna with Giuseppe Fricelli and earned diplomas from the Conservatory of Florence and the Incontri col Maestro International Piano Academy of Imola, where he worked extensively with Joaquín Achúcarro, Lazar Berman, Alexander Lonquich, Boris Petrushansky, and Franco Scala. Enrico Elisi appears at the National Gallery by arrangement with Arioso Artists Management.
PROGRAM
Ottorino Respighi (1879–1936)
Berceuse from Six Pieces for Violin and Piano (1901–1906)
Andantino
Luigi Dallapiccola (1904–1975)
Tartiniana seconda (1955–1956)
Pastorale
Tempo di Bourrée
Presto; leggerissimo
Variazioni: Decisamente; maestoso; tranquillo; doloroso;
alla sarabanda; deciso; duramente; con gagliardia
Respighi
Aria from Six Pieces for Violin and Piano (1901–1906)
Lento
Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882–1973)
Canto della lontananza (Song of the Distance) (1919)
Respighi
Sonata for Violin and Piano in B Minor, P. 110 (1916–17)
Moderato
Andante espressivo
Passacaglia: Allegro moderato ma energico
PROGRAM NOTES
In 2015 Italians mark the 100th anniversary of their nation’s entry into World War I, allying with France and England in what was then known as the Triple Entente. The first year of Italy’s participation in the war was tumultuous—more than half of Italians were opposed to intervention to begin with, and their fears were confirmed by a series of battles in the Carso, Tyrol, and other regions of northern Italy that resulted in 60,000 casualties and no territorial gain. By the end of the war, the number of victims had grown to 650,000, and the country found itself in a state of economic crisis, high unemployment, and political instability.
All three of the composers selected for today’s program by Federico Agostini and Enrico Elisi lived through the unsettling World War I period in Italy and its equally traumatic aftermath. Ottorino Respighi lived in Rome from 1913 onward, having received that year a coveted appointment as professor of composition at the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia. His fame grew quickly during the years 1914-1918—his Fountains of Rome and Antique Airs and Dances, both of which achieved immediate popular success, date from 1916 and 1917, respectively, and his ballet La boutique fantasque dates from 1918. It is perhaps no coincidence that Respighi turned to poems of the Englishman Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) for several of the songs that he wrote between 1914 and 1917.
Luigi Dallapiccola was still a child when Italy entered World War I, but he and his family were directly affected by it, living as they did in what was then called Pisino, Istria. That town was disputed territory throughout the war, changing hands several times between the Austro-Hungarian occupying forces and the Italians, both of whom laid claim to it. In 1916 Dallapiccola’s father’s school was closed by the Austrian government, and in March 1917 the family was interned in Graz, Austria, being suspected of Italian nationalism. Only after the war could they return to Pisino, which had been restored to Italy. Ironically, the period of exile in Graz gave the young Dallapiccola his first exposure to opera. His Tartiniana seconda, although it dates from the early 1950s, harks back to 1920, when he was a pupil of composer Antonio Illersberg (1882–1953), who encouraged him to look to earlier Italian music for inspiration. Dallapiccola’s works of this type also include Sonata canonica (after Paganini).
In the 1930s, the abuses of Italy’s Fascist regime (in particular its support of Fascist brutality in the Spanish Civil War and its anti-Semitic rhetoric) reawakened in Dallapiccola the abhorrence of tyranny that he had learned in his childhood, and led to the composition of Canti di prigionia (Prisoners’ Songs) and Il prigioniero (The Prisoner), both of which displeased the Fascists. Beleaguered by the Italian government throughout the remainder of Mussolini’s regime, Dallapiccola was obliged to live in hiding throughout much of 1944.
Like Dallapiccola, Gian Francesco Malipiero was deeply and directly affected by his experiences in World War I. In 1910 he selected a little town in the Veneto region, Asolo, as his venue for a quiet life devoted to composition, but, as fate would have it, that area, too, was disputed territory as soon as Italy entered the war. He and his family were forced to flee. He later wrote: “In 1914 the war disrupted my whole life, which remained, until 1920, a perennial tragedy. The works of these years perhaps reflect my agitation; however, I consider that if I have created something new in my art (formally and stylistically) it happened precisely in this period.” In addition to Canto della lontananza, Malipiero’s works from the World War I period include the opera L’orfeide (1918), the ballets Pantea (1917–1919) and La Mascherata delle principesse prigionere (The Masquerade of the Prisoner Princess) (1919), and the orchestral works Armenia (1917) and Ditirambo tragico (Tragic Dithyramb), all of which are marked by turbulence and stark contrasts.
Program notes by Stephen Ackert, Senior Music Program Advisor, National Gallery of Art
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push([‘_setAccount’, ‘UA-35823371-1’]);
_gaq.push([‘_trackPageview’]);
(function() {
var ga = document.createElement(‘script’); ga.type = ‘text/javascript’; ga.async = true;
ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’;
var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();