Menlo, inter alia
Aug. 4th, 2009 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacFortunately, I got my computer fixed (the problem turned out to be corroded memory cards, something my repair guru had never encountered before) in time to write this review of last Friday's concert.
Ignore the accompanying photograph; the performers didn't dress like that for the concert. The woman on the left was wearing a layered fluffy dress that made her look like the waitress at a Mexican restaurant. But that doesn't matter: she's an excellent violinist.
Besides that full-length concert, there have been lots of other smaller Menlo festival events I haven't even mentioned. I've about had my fill of the master classes, insightful as they are, because there's only so much you can take of hearing one short movement and then having it analyzed for half an hour. I just want them to go on playing! The better the student performers are, the more picayune the analysis is; but with some of them, genuine audible new depths are sounded by the time they're done.
The best master class instructor was Jeffrey Kahane, who's a pianist but didn't ignore the string players in his group of students (probably because he's also a conductor). He offered real insights into the meaning of the music-making process, and offered some more at a lecture titled "Odysseus, Prometheus, and Beethoven: The Mythological Sources of the Eroica Symphony and Other Musical Masterworks of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century." Every time a speaker at some other event announced that one as forthcoming, they apologized for the formidable title, as if there's something wrong about being academic.
In fact, it was a loosely organized informal talk, focused on Kahane's reactions to learning Ancient Greek because he wants to know what about Homer has so fascinated composers* - even though most of those composers have been reading him in translation. Including Beethoven,** who used a German translation that - remarkably, and unreproducibly in English, according to Kahane - copies Homer's original meter. Kahane said he's not the first person to point out that the theme of the Allegretto of Beethoven's Seventh - that's this one (YouTube link), if you don't know it offhand - is written in the mixture of dactyls (DAH-duh-duh) and spondees (DAH-DAH) that characterize Homer (though he uses them more irregularly than Beethoven's regular alternation). But it was news to me.
More satisfying than the master classes are the "prelude" concerts, young professionals playing two works, for free. I just got back from one with Mozart's Kegelstatt Trio for clarinet, viola, and piano, the piece he famously wrote in between rounds of bowling. It's not a complex work, but it is considered one of Mozart's masterpieces, which should put the lie to the fallacy that music has to be complicated to be great. Followed by Beethoven's Op. 135 string quartet, his last composition, a work strange enough to convince you - as indeed it convinced many of his contemporaries - that Beethoven had gone off his rocker. One young contemporary who liked it, though, was Felix Mendelssohn. The LK Quartet, who'd just been coached in it this morning by the Pacifica Quartet of last Friday's Mendelssohn concert, gave it a splendidly querulous performance.
There've also been a few more of those young performer concerts. When a tiny girl - she's ten, but looks much younger - takes the stage with a violin and grinds away with full force on a Handel passacaglia, I find I have to avert my eyes, because my brain simply cannot process the remarkable event occurring before my sight.
*Not that many of them seem to have gotten around to writing musical works based on Homer
**Including Beethoven
Ignore the accompanying photograph; the performers didn't dress like that for the concert. The woman on the left was wearing a layered fluffy dress that made her look like the waitress at a Mexican restaurant. But that doesn't matter: she's an excellent violinist.
Besides that full-length concert, there have been lots of other smaller Menlo festival events I haven't even mentioned. I've about had my fill of the master classes, insightful as they are, because there's only so much you can take of hearing one short movement and then having it analyzed for half an hour. I just want them to go on playing! The better the student performers are, the more picayune the analysis is; but with some of them, genuine audible new depths are sounded by the time they're done.
The best master class instructor was Jeffrey Kahane, who's a pianist but didn't ignore the string players in his group of students (probably because he's also a conductor). He offered real insights into the meaning of the music-making process, and offered some more at a lecture titled "Odysseus, Prometheus, and Beethoven: The Mythological Sources of the Eroica Symphony and Other Musical Masterworks of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century." Every time a speaker at some other event announced that one as forthcoming, they apologized for the formidable title, as if there's something wrong about being academic.
In fact, it was a loosely organized informal talk, focused on Kahane's reactions to learning Ancient Greek because he wants to know what about Homer has so fascinated composers* - even though most of those composers have been reading him in translation. Including Beethoven,** who used a German translation that - remarkably, and unreproducibly in English, according to Kahane - copies Homer's original meter. Kahane said he's not the first person to point out that the theme of the Allegretto of Beethoven's Seventh - that's this one (YouTube link), if you don't know it offhand - is written in the mixture of dactyls (DAH-duh-duh) and spondees (DAH-DAH) that characterize Homer (though he uses them more irregularly than Beethoven's regular alternation). But it was news to me.
More satisfying than the master classes are the "prelude" concerts, young professionals playing two works, for free. I just got back from one with Mozart's Kegelstatt Trio for clarinet, viola, and piano, the piece he famously wrote in between rounds of bowling. It's not a complex work, but it is considered one of Mozart's masterpieces, which should put the lie to the fallacy that music has to be complicated to be great. Followed by Beethoven's Op. 135 string quartet, his last composition, a work strange enough to convince you - as indeed it convinced many of his contemporaries - that Beethoven had gone off his rocker. One young contemporary who liked it, though, was Felix Mendelssohn. The LK Quartet, who'd just been coached in it this morning by the Pacifica Quartet of last Friday's Mendelssohn concert, gave it a splendidly querulous performance.
There've also been a few more of those young performer concerts. When a tiny girl - she's ten, but looks much younger - takes the stage with a violin and grinds away with full force on a Handel passacaglia, I find I have to avert my eyes, because my brain simply cannot process the remarkable event occurring before my sight.
*Not that many of them seem to have gotten around to writing musical works based on Homer
**Including Beethoven
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Date: 2009-08-05 05:28 am (UTC)That's in addition to the cultural influence of Greek on poets such as Goethe, Hölderlin, and Nietzsche. It isn't as if English verse lacked such influences; Keats is a prime example, and Swinburne a more eccentric one.