festival

Welcome to Music@Menlo

Dear Friends,

Welcome to Music@Menlo’s 2013 season, From Bach, celebrating the timeless work of Johann Sebastian Bach, the composer whose profound legacy has shaped Western music over the two and a half centuries since his death. We are proud to once again offer a rich festival experience to be found nowhere else—a stellar roster of the world’s greatest chamber musicians, multimedia lectures expanding on the festival’s signature thematic programming, and countless opportunities for audiences to engage with the music through interactive discussions, master classes, and free institute performances.

Whether they inspire a single concert or provide context for an entire festival, the most transformative musical experiences of our own lives inevitably surface at Music@Menlo; we bring you these musical revelations with tremendous excitement. This we promise you: if you find it at Music@Menlo, it has a story deeply rooted in our personal history.

Such an experience occurred for us during Music@Menlo’s ninth festival, which illustrated Brahms’s wide range of musical sources and influences. A program opened with an eloquent performance of Bach’s Second Suite for Solo Cello and then moved to works by composers indebted to both Bach and Brahms.

Bach is a composer we had long revered, and we spoke excitedly of this concert’s extraordinary effect. Had the music of Bach—which unquestionably laid the foundations for the flowering of classical music through the present day—transformed the works which followed it, by composers including Schoenberg and Harbison? Or had Bach’s music, through its cosmic logic, simply opened our ears to hearing everything that followed it more clearly and vividly? These questions blossomed into our dream of an entire Music@Menlo season programmed in this special way, and in due time From Bach was born.

What better way to inaugurate our second decade than with concerts that begin with works by a composer without equal, created at the glorious dawn of great music?

We look forward to sharing this season with you.

David Finckel and Wu Han
Artistic Directors
The Martin Family Artistic Directorship

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