one week @ Menlo
The Music@Menlo festival, which is held mostly in Atherton and Palo Alto instead of Menlo Park, began this week. Last year I had to miss most of it because I was out of town. This year I'm hearing a lot more. A lot of it is free, and some of it I'm being asked to review, hmmm, trala.
It began for me on Monday with a concert and its free "prelude" performance, which I attended with reviewing pencil in hand, in company with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
divertimento and danine and a bunch of grapes, which was all I had for dinner because the prelude started at 6 and the concert at 8. For the main concert, we had one duo (for two violins) by Schnittke, one trio (piano and strings) by Tchaikovsky, one quartet (strings) by Mendelssohn, and one quintet (winds) by Ravel arranged by someone else. They were all supposed to be tied together under the label "Homage", but the ways in which they were homages differed greatly. There really was no theme here, especially because the quartet players were a tight-lipped machine while the trio following them emoted all over the place. Both were fine of their kind, and anybody who can leave me happy with Tchaikovsky's big sloppy trio must know what they're doing. The prelude, with young professionals as performers, gave us two of Beethoven's gentler works, an early piano & strings quartet and the Archduke Trio, all pleasant.
On Wednesday I was back for another prelude, this time without the following concert. The string quartet did well enough with Haydn's "Joke" Quartet (Op. 33 No. 2), milking the surprise ending for all it was worth, but their Shostakovich Piano & Strings Quintet that followed lacked maturity and seasoning - until Shostakovich's deliberately blank-faced, ambiguous ending, which in these hands melted like butter. Very fine.
Then on Thursday, a "young performers" concert, also free, and by young they mean young. These are the students whose training is the hidden side of the festival. The concert started with the mid-teens and got younger, and when, at the end, a small orchestra of even smaller 8-to-11 year olds took the stage and started in on Bach's F Minor keyboard concerto, one could hardly believe one's eyes. Or ears. Insert reference to Dr. Johnson and the dog here; how good it was wasn't the point: it was still amazing. And it wasn't at all bad, particularly the pianist whose name was Hilda Huang. The kids got two curtain calls, which they evidently had no idea what to do with.
There's some more this weekend, and then two more weeks of this. I'll be missing some for Mythcon, of which I'm most regretting a concert whose theme is Death (o wacko, but they're playing Schubert's [topic] and the Maiden Quartet, though these themes are so loose, the Tchaikovsky Trio would have fit just as well), but there will be more.
It began for me on Monday with a concert and its free "prelude" performance, which I attended with reviewing pencil in hand, in company with
divertimento and danine and a bunch of grapes, which was all I had for dinner because the prelude started at 6 and the concert at 8. For the main concert, we had one duo (for two violins) by Schnittke, one trio (piano and strings) by Tchaikovsky, one quartet (strings) by Mendelssohn, and one quintet (winds) by Ravel arranged by someone else. They were all supposed to be tied together under the label "Homage", but the ways in which they were homages differed greatly. There really was no theme here, especially because the quartet players were a tight-lipped machine while the trio following them emoted all over the place. Both were fine of their kind, and anybody who can leave me happy with Tchaikovsky's big sloppy trio must know what they're doing. The prelude, with young professionals as performers, gave us two of Beethoven's gentler works, an early piano & strings quartet and the Archduke Trio, all pleasant.On Wednesday I was back for another prelude, this time without the following concert. The string quartet did well enough with Haydn's "Joke" Quartet (Op. 33 No. 2), milking the surprise ending for all it was worth, but their Shostakovich Piano & Strings Quintet that followed lacked maturity and seasoning - until Shostakovich's deliberately blank-faced, ambiguous ending, which in these hands melted like butter. Very fine.
Then on Thursday, a "young performers" concert, also free, and by young they mean young. These are the students whose training is the hidden side of the festival. The concert started with the mid-teens and got younger, and when, at the end, a small orchestra of even smaller 8-to-11 year olds took the stage and started in on Bach's F Minor keyboard concerto, one could hardly believe one's eyes. Or ears. Insert reference to Dr. Johnson and the dog here; how good it was wasn't the point: it was still amazing. And it wasn't at all bad, particularly the pianist whose name was Hilda Huang. The kids got two curtain calls, which they evidently had no idea what to do with.
There's some more this weekend, and then two more weeks of this. I'll be missing some for Mythcon, of which I'm most regretting a concert whose theme is Death (o wacko, but they're playing Schubert's [topic] and the Maiden Quartet, though these themes are so loose, the Tchaikovsky Trio would have fit just as well), but there will be more.