Music@Menlo: more bites at the apple

Having returned from my trip with a week yet to run on the Menlo Festival, I was able to attend a few more events. I didn't have tickets to any of the mainstage events, long since sold out and I hadn't wanted to plan far enough in advance to get tickets.

But the concerts by the young professionals in their 20s, and by the teenage students, are free and tickets aren't available until 9 AM on the morning of the event, at which point they vanish rapidly. So I got to a few of those.

The highlights of these events were the Saint-Saëns Piano Trio No. 1 in F, Op. 18, one of the first attempts to make chamber music that sounded distinctively French, full of unusual and striking effects; and Mozart's Divertimento for string trio in Eb, K. 563. The pre-concert remarks warned that this was an unusually long work, but I'd never heard it before, despite its size and importance and the fact that it's fully mature Mozart. I had the rare experience during this performance of falling into a state of perfect contentment. The music could have gone on indefinitely as far as I cared. Even my daily aches and pains vanished for the length of the work. I got to speak to violinist Julia Schilz afterwards to thank her for a performance that really touched the soul.

This is the last year the founding artistic directors are in office, but I expect Menlo will continue on its wonted path of emphasizing the classics. Even incoming co-artistic director Dmitri Atapine, who's been known to play Ligeti's Cello Sonata at the Festival, explained why the student concerts stick to the heart of the repertoire. Sometimes the students come in eager to play new and modern works, he says, but then he asks, "How many Haydn quartets have you played?" When the answer is "none," he says they need more grounding in the classics first.

Also in the music biz, Lyric Theatre did another "Gilbert and Sullivan Sing-Off." Following the same format though with different content than last year's, it took the form of a supposed competition between three G&S companies, one which plays the works straight, one which tinkers with them - especially gender-swapping - and one which is just goofy. A lot of unusually Loud singers this time, the most effective of which was Leslie Oesterich in the gender-swapped role of Sir Roderic singing "When the Night Wind Howls." The theme of the show's script was that community theater groups, even of contradicting artistic principles, support each other's endeavors.