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)
Yes! (and Bird! and Bach!)
Posted: July 20
Pianist Stephen Prutsman electrified Music@Menlo’s audiences on Sunday morning with “Bach and Forth,” the season’s first Carte Blanche Concert. Stephen’s innovative recital program brought together the music of Bach with other composers and musical traditions. Highlights included lush renditions of Ravel and Wagner, a spellbinding Uzbek folksong, and a seductive tango by Osvaldo Golijov; Stephen’s own revelatory arrangements of tunes by Charlie Parker and Yes cast The Well-Tempered Clavier in astonishingly new light.
The evening saw the second performance of “Towards Bach,” now with the incandescent soprano Celena Shafer fully recovered and onstage to deliver Bach’s Wedding Cantata, a perennial favorite of concert audiences, and arias by Bach and Handel. Bach’s Fourth Brandenburg Concerto, featuring violinist Erin Keefe and flautists Demarre McGill and Sooyun Kim, brought the house down at evening’s end.