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)
Modernist Marathon
Posted: August 03
Music@Menlo presented some six hours of music over the course of a mammoth Sunday, beginning at 10:00 a.m. with the summer’s final Carte Blanche Concert. The renowned Borromeo Quartet, making their Music@Menlo debut, delivered a Herculean performance of the complete string quartet cycle of Bela Bartok. The Borromeo will return to the stage on Thursday and Friday evenings for the season’s final concert program, “Music Now: Voices of Our Time,” performing the West Coast premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s Scenes from the Poet’s Dreams with pianist Gary Graffman; the composer herself arrives at Music@Menlo this week, along with composers Gabriela Lena Frank and Kenneth Frazelle.
In the meantime, the festival continues its exploration of the early twentieth century. On Sunday afternoon, the Chamber Music Institute’s International Program artists performed a riveting program comprising Janacek’s String Quartet no. 1 (“The Kreutzer Sonata”) and Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata and powerful Opus 57 Piano Quintet. Concert program IV, “The Rise of Modernism,” followed, featuring more Music@Menlo debut artists: to close the first half, baritone Robert Gardner and pianist Anna Polonsky delighted audiences with a selection of songs by Charles Ives. And befitting the day when the world remembered the Nobel Prize-winning Soviet author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the concert ended with music by two other Russian cultural heroes whose art likewise combated the Stalin regime: Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes and Shostakovich’s Two Pieces for String Octet. Both the Prelude and “Rise of Modernism” program repeat a final time on Monday evening at Menlo School.