daily festival recaps
- Music@Menlo Wraps Up Spectacular Sixth Season (August 08)
- Voices of Our Time (August 07)
- "without whom we would be mute" (August 06)
- Just Another Day at Music@Menlo (August 05)
- Private Music Made Public (August 04)
- Modernist Marathon (August 03)
- The Musical Imagination (August 03)
- Delicious Dissonance (August 01)
- What Ithaka Means (August 01)
- Romantic Cadence (July 30)
- Brahms the Progressive (July 30)
- "Vissi d'arte..." (July 29)
- "...and all the world is fresh and bright again." (July 27)
- Festive Day, Romantic Evening (July 27)
- Open House (July 25)
- "Origins of Modern String Playing" and Today's Rising Stars (July 25)
- Classical Bookends (July 23)
- Lesser Gives More (July 22)
- Fame is the Spur (July 22)
- Yes! (and Bird! and Bach!) (July 20)
- Baroque Heroics (July 19)
- Towards Bach (July 18)
- A Grand Beginning (July 17)
Baroque Heroics
Posted: July 19
Music@Menlo tossed listeners some delightful curveballs on opening night. Despite an untimely illness hampering soprano Celena Shafer, festival artists and Chamber Music Institute students and faculty deftly assembled a knock-out program combining timeless masterpieces (the Third and Fourth Brandenburg Concertos of Bach, among others) and less frequently heard gems. Highlights included the ravishing Oboe Concerto of Italian composer Benedetto Marcello, poetically rendered by oboist Kathryn Greenbank in her festival debut. The young artists of the Institute’s International Program contributed too, reprising their Corelli Concerto Grosso from the evening’s Prelude Performance.
On Sunday morning, pianist Stephen Prutsman—another Music@Menlo debut artist—presents the season’s first Carte Blanche Concert, “Bach and Forth” (10:30 a.m., Stent Family Hall); in the afternoon, cellist Laurence Lesser leads an impromptu master class with the Institute’s outstanding young cellists (2:00 p.m., Menlo School); and a convalescent Celena Shafer reclaims the stage for Sunday evening’s repeat performance of “Towards Bach,” making her festival debut with Bach’s sublime Wedding Cantata and other works (6:00 p.m., Stent Family Hall).