I approached my first Menlo concert for review on Sunday with misgivings. A narrow slice of the repertoire, it consisted of four works all written during the same half-century (roughly 19C second half) from one small patch of central Europe. That's too default to be worth talking about - I don't like spending my limited review space complaining about the repertoire - while the only interesting thing the works had in common was in all being for three instruments, though not all the same three instruments.
But that seemed a rather esoteric theme to base my review on, so I was wondering how I'd do it.
I found my answer when we got to the third piece on the program, the Elegy by Josef Suk. Young violinist Jessica Lee simply ran circles around the two storied veterans she was playing with, so much so that if this was a meeting of the generations - as was suggested in the introduction to the concert - it was clearly the younger generation that had the goods.
And I realized that the same thing had been true of the second piece, Brahms's Clarinet Trio, which is basically a duet for clarinet and cello with piano accompaniment. Just with less vehemence. But the young cellist had played full of passion and color and a variety of tones and expressions, while the old clarinetist had been kind of bland by comparison. Bland, on a clarinet? The orchestral instrument with the most capacity for wild colorful expression? But yeah, he didn't exploit any of that.
So that was my theme, and while the other works on the program didn't show the same contrast, it was no trouble fitting them in to the theme. And here's the finished review.
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