Next Sunday: United States Premiere Of Stephen Hough's "Requiem Aeternam (After Victoria)" For String Sextet At National Gallery Of Art

National Gallery of Art String Quartet
With Henry Valoris, violist, and Marion Baker, cellist

Requiem aeternam (after Victoria)

Music composed by Stephen Hough for the exhibition:

The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture, 1600 – 1700
April 4, 2010
Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm
East Building Auditorium
National Gallery of Art

Click here for program note (upcoming)

Header credit:

Hendrick ter Brugghen
Bagpipe Player, 1624
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Paul Mellon Fund and Greg and Candy Fazakerley Fund
2009.24.1

"Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588–1629), as no other Dutch artist, could capture the rhythms of music in the very way he composed his paintings. His musicians lean into their instruments, their bodies alive with the joy of the sounds they bring forth, whether coaxed from a violin, lute, recorder, or bagpipe. In this remarkable image a bagpipe player, seen in strict profile, squeezes the leather bag between his forearms as he blows through the instrument's pipe and fingers a tune on the chanter. Two large drones, composed of different wooden sections, rest on his bare shoulder. The interlocking rhythms of this ensemble—the round shapes of the musician's shoulder, beret, and brown bagpipe bag, the flowing patterns of folds in his creamy shirt and taupe robe, the pronounced diagonals of the drones and pipe, and the verticality of the chanter—parallel those of a musical score."

Image and text: Copyright © 2010 National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC