concert review: Music at Menlo

Well, the Music at Menlo summer festival has started, which means I'm spending a lot of my time up there. Last year, the Menlo School campus was under construction and the ballroom concert facility, Stent Hall, was closed. This year Stent is open, but the construction is still going on, so half the parking lot is still occupied with construction office trailers. And the lawns on campus are now replaced by gravel. They were artificial turf before, I think, so I don't think water rationing has prompted this, but it will put a damper on the outdoor lawn practice sessions that Menlo has been prone to.

Fortunately the first two concerts have been over at the CPA, which is the high school auditorium across town, and which is actually large enough for just about everybody who'd like to come. The first concert was Italian Baroque, and I covered that for the Daily Journal, which won't be out for a few days yet; and the second was high Classicism, which I covered for SFCV and which is up.

In case you wonder, as one did, what the "Hob." in Haydn's work lists is short for, it's "Hoboken." Anthony van Hoboken was the scholar who cataloged Haydn's works, as Ludwig von Köchel did Mozart, though Hoboken's is more of a classified list where Köchel's is chronological.

I wish I'd had more space to discuss Gibbs' lecture, which was fascinating. He began by discussing the rise of professional playing and the need for textbooks to teach it. In 1756, the year of Mozart's birth, he said, an influential violin textbook appeared, which he quoted from. Two decades later, the author wrote Mozart a letter encouraging his violin playing, even though we think of Mozart mostly as a pianist. By this time I had been waiting patiently for Gibbs to reveal the punchline, which is that the author had reason to be concerned with Mozart, as he was Mozart's father, Leopold. When Gibbs did unveil that tidbit, it amused the audience greatly.

Gibbs has compiled a list of the repertoire at Ignaz Schuppanzigh's 1820s set of chamber music subscription concerts, the first set of their kind, and found that 86% of the music was by one of the trinity, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. That's what really set them off as the founding composers of what we now call the classical repertoire. The rest was by younger living composers, starting with George Onslow (a Frenchman I've heard of but know little of), and also including Spohr, Hummel, Andreas Romberg, Carl Czerny, and oh yes, a fellow named Schubert. Why did Schubert write his String Quintet with two cellos, instead of two violas as Mozart and Beethoven did? Well, probably because he'd been listening to Onslow, who did it that way, like this.