Quartetto Gelato Sunday, March 2, 2008 at 3 p.m. NAS Auditorium 2100 C Street, NW Washington, DC Free. Photo ID required. This concert is preceded by a reception. More info
Peter DeSotto - tenor, violin Alexander Sevastian – accordion, piano Carina Reeves – cello Kornel Wolnak-- clarinet P R O G R A M LONDON Slow Train FLANDERS/SWANN Arr. Steljes/De Sotto PARIS Under Paris Skies GANNON/GIRAUD (Sous le Ciel de Paris) Arr. Bill Bridges Tombeau de Couperin MAURICE RAVEL Prelude; Minuet; Rigaudon Arr. Raymond Luedeke La Vie en Rose PIAF/LOUIGUY Arr. Shelly Berger MUNICH Konzertstück Opus 79 C.M. VON WEBER Finale: The Feast Arr. De Sotto/Sevastian Rondo Alla Zingarese JOHANNES BRAHMS Arr. Charles T. Cozens I N T E R M I S S I O N Passacaglia HANDEL/HALVORSEN BUDAPEST Hungaria KOSSOVITS/TRADITIONAL Arr. Peter De Sotto Dein Ist Mein Ganzes Herz FRANZ LEHAR (My Heart is Yours Alone) Arr. Eric Robertson Kállai Kettós ZOLTAN KODALY Arr. Howard Cable BUCHAREST Romanian Caravan VARIOUS Arr. Abramovitch/Sevastian/De Sotto QUARTETTO GELATO TRAVELS THE ORIENT EXPRESS The very words conjure up an aura of a bygone age of leisurely, luxurious train travel, a time when well-heeled passengers stepped into a world of polished brass and gleaming inlaid wood, of haute cuisine and personal butlers, of crisp linen and fluffy towels. The train embraced a world of glamour and excitement, adventure and intrigue, fun and romance, with stops in some of Europe’s most splendid cities and an eastern terminal on another continent. Aristocrats, royalty, diplomats, tycoons, film stars and movie moguls were regular customers. Six films, nineteen books and several television documentaries feature the Orient Express, probably the most famous train in the world. The members of Quartetto Gelato invite you to travel with them on this fabled train for a musical journey across Europe, beginning in London and stopping in Paris, Munich, Budapest and Bucharest. At each station we pause for music representative of that city, some of it by classical composers like Ravel and Brahms, and some by those who wrote in a more popular vein like Lehár and Piaf. Actually “the” Orient Express was not a single train, or even a single line. The very first train bearing this name left Paris on October 4, 1883 and went as far as Rousse, Bulgaria via Paris and Munich. In Rousse passengers transferred to another train which took them to Varna, and from there across the Black Sea by ferry to Istanbul (or Constantinople, as it was then called) Two years later the train began taking a more southerly route to Istanbul, passing through Belgrade and the heart of Bulgaria, thus avoiding the ferry. Istanbul remained the eastern terminal until 1977, when service was cut back to Bucharest, then further to just Budapest. With the opening of the twelve-mile Simplon Tunnel through the Alps a second, even more southerly route, the Simplon Orient Express, was added to the service, passing through Milan, Venice and Trieste en route to Istanbul. In 1932 a third service was added, the Arlberg Orient Express running through Basel, Zurich, Innsbruck and Vienna en route to Istanbul. Numerous other variants to the route, some with sleeping cars, some without, have operated over the years. The Orient Express still exists in name, but its route is far shorter than the legendary complete run. Until June 8, 2007, one could still ride the Orient Express overnight from Paris to Vienna. But with the opening of the TGV (train à grande vitesse, French for "high-speed train") between Paris and Strasbourg on June 9, the Orient Express route shrank still further. It is now known as the EuroNight express, operated by the German and Austrian national railways. Hence, what is left of that first “Express d’Orient” train that left Paris125 years ago now runs only from Strasbourg to Vienna. There also exists a Venice Simplon Orient Express (the VSOE, begun in 1982) with 31-hour service from London to Venice using restored vintage sleeping cars. This train, operated entirely by a private company, is a super-luxury, super-expensive (the one-way fare is nearly $2,000) that preserves the spirit of the original though it cannot claim to be a true descendant, nor does it use the Simplon Tunnel. (A detailed history of the various Orient Express trains can be found at www.seat61.com/Austria.) Let’s now step back in time to board the train as it prepares to leave London on its transcontinental journey. Train buffs will tell you that the Orient Express never actually served London and they are right, but connections could, of course, be made from there to Paris. London is a city with so much to see that Samuel Johnson famously declared “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” But the train is ready to depart, and we’ll have to see London some other time. As a kind of nostalgic glance at a bygone era, “Slow Train” makes an appropriate musical beginning to our journey. The song, written by the famous partnership of actor-singer Michael Flanders and composer-pianist Donald Swann, reflects the spate of closures of British railway stations during the 1960s, spearheaded by the infamous Richard Beeching. Our first stop is Paris, City of Light, also the city of love and romance. The words to Kim Gannon’s and Herbert Giraud’s quintessential song “Under Paris Skies” leave no doubt about this: “Stranger beware/There's love in the air/Under Paris skies./Try to be smart/And don't let your heart catch on fire./Love becomes king/The moment it's spring/Under Paris skies./Lonely hearts meet/Somewhere on the streets of desire.” Another Parisian chestnut is “La Vie en rose” (“Life in Pink,” in English, but the French sounds much better), which has been used in nearly two dozen films and sung by virtually every famous name in the business: Ella Fitzgerald, Audrey Hepburn, Louis Armstrong, Marlene Dietrich, and Céline Dion among others. But more than anyone else, it is Edith Piaf with whom this song is indelibly associated. Piaf wrote the lyrics to the melody by Louis Gugliemi (“Louiguy”) and first popularized the song in 1946. Also in Paris we hear excerpts from the elegant suite of piano pieces, Le Tombeau de Couperin, by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), arranged for Quartetto Gelato by Raymond Luedeke, associate principal clarinetist of the Toronto Symphony. This music too is an act of homage, not so much to a city but to the bygone era of eighteenth-century French music in all its courtly elegance. The train pushes on into Germany, where we stop in Munich for music by two prominent nineteenth-century German composers. Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826) composed his Konzertstück (Concert Piece) as a vehicle for himself to dazzle audiences at the piano. (In Quartetto Gelato’s rendition the piano part is transferred to the accordion, with spectacular results!) The lively march tune of the finale is meant to represent knights returning from the crusades with all the attendant cheering, waving of banners and feasting. Virtuosity is also the keynote in the finale of the Piano Quartet No. 1 by Johannes Brahms (1833-1897). It is written in the ever-popular Hungarian gypsy style, imbued with pounding rhythms and fiery passion. In its original form the music was scored for violin, viola, cello and piano, but Quartetto Gelato plays it for a totally different foursome prepared by Charles Cozens. At the mid-point of our musical journey we pause for a short piece by George Frideric Handel, a German-born composer who studied in Italy and spent most of his professional life in London. In a sense then, he traveled through much of Europe, as did the Orient Express, though trains were still far in the future when Handel was alive (1685-1759). The Passacaglia we hear tonight comes from a keyboard suite, which the Norwegian composer and violinist Johann Halvorsen arranged for other instruments. A passacaglia is a musical form in which a steadily recurring melodic pattern in the bass line serves as a foundation over which other voices develop a continuous flow of variations. Our next stop is Budapest, capital of Hungary, a city of magnificent palaces, castles, churches, bridges straddling the Danube and healthful thermal springs. Here we find a tribute to Hungary by a composer so obscure we know neither his year of birth or of his death, only that he lived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But the great Franz Liszt is known to have used some of József Kossovits’ melodies in his Hungarian Rhapsodies. Franz Lehár (1870-1948) is indelibly associated with Viennese operetta (The Merry Widow being his most famous) but he was born in Hungary (Komárom, a small city northwest of Budapest on the Slovakian border) and so deserves to be heard at this stop on the Orient Express. The Merry Widow remains Lehár’s most popular operetta today, but The Land of Smiles cannot be far behind. It premiered in the same month as the Great Depression (October, 1929), but within a year there were some two hundred productions all over Europe. “Dein ist mein ganzes Herz” (My heart is yours alone) is one of its biggest hits, popularized by the great Austrian tenor Richard Tauber. Finally in Budapest we hear instrumental arrangements of three vibrant dances by one of Hungary’s greatest composers, Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967). His Kállai Kettós (Couple Dances from Kálló) were originally written for solo voice and piano, then arranged for mixed chorus and folk-music orchestra. The music, based on pentatonic folk songs from the village of Nagykálló in northeastern Hungary, penetrate to the very heart of the national ethos. At journey’s end we roll into Bucharest at the far edge of Europe, barely three hundred miles from Istanbul. It is a city of rich cultural life, tree-lined boulevards, fashionable parks and even its own Arc de Triomphe. Small wonder it became known as “Little Paris.” According to legend, Bucharest was founded by a shepherd named Bucur, whose name in Romanian means “joy.” How appropriate, then, to find the final number on our Orient Express program is a potpourri of lively, joyous, folk-inspired tunes all rolled into a Romanian Caravan. -- Program notes by Robert Markow, copyright 2008

***** All concerts are free and open to the public. Doors to the auditorium open 30 minutes prior to the performance. Limited parking is available in the visitor’s lot at the corner of 21st and C Sts NW. Directions to the National Academy of Sciences For more information, email arts@nas.edu or call (202) 334-2436