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)
Delicious Dissonance
Posted: August 01
At Friday’s master class, resident Renaissance man Bruce Adolphe—whom Music@Menlo audiences know for his gifts as a composer, pianist, author, and lecturer—put on his educator hat to guide the Chamber Music Institute’s Young Performers through works by Haydn and Dvorak. Bruce’s engaging and incisive instruction paid immediate dividends just hours later: the afternoon’s Koret Young Performers Concert featured a top flight performance of the Dvorak “American” Quartet heard earlier in the day, along with precocious readings of Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Mozart. (Of especial note was the KYPC’s finale, for which the trio of pianist Christine Kim, violinist Alex Fager, and cellist Coleman Itzkoff brought to the stage a pedigree of visual elegance matched only by their mellifluous sonorities.)
Bruce commanded the stage again in the evening: the season’s third Encounter, “Delicious Dissonance: Melodic, Harmonic, and Rhythmic Dissonance in the Twentieth Century,” featured Bruce’s signature combination of an encyclopedic knowledge and devilish wit. The Encounter explored the use of dissonance from Mozart and Beethoven to Stravinsky, Bartok, and other modernist composers, gearing listeners for the festival’s upcoming concert programs. The season’s final Carte Blanche Concert, the Bartok Quartet Cycle (Sunday, 10:00a, Stent Family Hall), complements the next exciting chapter of “The Unfolding of Music II,” a survey of the innovative musical stylings of the early twentieth-century modernists. There are still a limited number of tickets available to concert program IV, “The Rise of Modernism,” which presents works by Debussy, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and others on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday evenings.