Youth Gets Served

Jul 25, 11:37 PM

Open House day at Music@Menlo featured a wide variety of open-access events, including, at the midday Cafė Conversation, a fascinating look at the innovative techniques of 2009 visual artist Theo Noll. The festival’s youngest musicians delivered a stellar show at the afternoon’s Koret Young Performers Concert, with Martin Family Hall filled to capacity (even including listeners seated onstage alongside the performers). Saturday culminated in the season’s third Encounter, an audio-visual recreation of Felix Mendelssohn’s remarkable Grand Tour—with no less than eminent Mendelssohn scholar R. Larry Todd serving as tour guide.

Sunday offers the season’s first Carte Blanche Concert, a Herculean program of the complete works for cello and piano by Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms, performed by Colin Carr and Thomas Sauer (10:00 a.m., Stent Family Hall). Following this ambitious double-recital program, the Chamber Music Institute’s young artists give the weekend’s second Koret Young Performers Concert, bringing together works by Mozart, Dvorak, and Clara Schumann (5:00 p.m., Martin Family Hall).