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Menlo again
Aug. 5th, 2010 10:01 pmToday's "young performers" concert was a little less awesome than the previous one. A pair of 10-to-12-year-olds playing an unaccompanied sonata for two violins by Leclair couldn't quite agree on a tempo, and came close to inventing phase music 230 years before its time. A suite of four cellists strained their way through transcriptions of Bach chorales. Two more unaccompanied violinists were dry, even raw, in a piece by de Bériot, an early 19C violinist/composer who, from the evidence of this piece, wanted to be Paganini with soul. A movement of the Brahms Op. 25 piano quartet was better, and then all this pillowy music was dispersed by four teenagers who essayed Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 3. Though they prated Volkovishly in their introductory remarks, they lacked the irony or the Weltschmerz to do justice to this hard, caustic work, but they certainly tried. Earlier in the day, the Miró Quartet worked on this with them in a master class, and conveyed what they could. The violist did remember to follow the sneaky suggestion to turn towards the audience to adjust the sound balance in her duet with the first violinist.
This was my first visit to the Menlo-Atherton CPA, the new auditorium on the high school campus, a mile away from the Menlo School hq of the festival. Visually it's a bit warmer than the usual cold metallic form of this school of concert-hall architecture, and sonically, it's dry but again a warm kind of dry, and insofar as I could tell from one location, not spotty.
The tricky part was getting there. I've driven past it many times on Middlefield, but what looks like a gate on that road isn't. Not wanting to try turning around on Mfld in the heavy afternoon traffic, I had to rummage around for several minutes in the tiny winding lanes of Atherton to get around to Ringwood where the entrance to the parking lot is.
Heard from a few rows behind me during a break in the concert:
"Did you forget your hearing aid?"
"Huh?"
"Did you forget your hearing aid?"
"Eh?"
"Did you forget your hearing aid?"
"What?"
This was my first visit to the Menlo-Atherton CPA, the new auditorium on the high school campus, a mile away from the Menlo School hq of the festival. Visually it's a bit warmer than the usual cold metallic form of this school of concert-hall architecture, and sonically, it's dry but again a warm kind of dry, and insofar as I could tell from one location, not spotty.
The tricky part was getting there. I've driven past it many times on Middlefield, but what looks like a gate on that road isn't. Not wanting to try turning around on Mfld in the heavy afternoon traffic, I had to rummage around for several minutes in the tiny winding lanes of Atherton to get around to Ringwood where the entrance to the parking lot is.
Heard from a few rows behind me during a break in the concert:
"Did you forget your hearing aid?"
"Huh?"
"Did you forget your hearing aid?"
"Eh?"
"Did you forget your hearing aid?"
"What?"
