The Menlo Festival ended on Saturday, and today saw the publication of my review of the previous Sunday's concert. It was put off a week because it was a vocal program and the previous week's issue was clogged with three opera reviews. I had my review of Cabrillo in that issue instead. The put-off publication meant I had an extra day to write the review, which I appreciated after having just finished up the Cabrillo one.
I don't have much to add to it. My editors cut my 875-word review down to 650 words, mostly by cutting detail and context, but they left all my main points intact, so despite a few minor added glitches, I count this as good editing.
That Sunday concert was the last time I went up to Menlo this year. All the free concerts and coaching sessions I wanted to hear are online, and it's less time-consuming (a major issue for me right now) to watch them online than go up there. As for the two remaining mainstage concerts I wanted to hear, I bought livestream tickets for those and also appreciated them from home. Unlike the free concerts which are up permanently, these are available only to purchasers and just for a few days.
But it's fortunate you don't have to be live, because the first one took place on Friday while I was at Cabrillo. It was the Viano Quartet, old favorites from when they won the Banff competition six years ago, doing a standard program that even included an encore, which Menlo never does. I liked their crisp and witty Haydn Op 76/5 and their dark and wretched Shostakovich Ninth better than their attempt at jollity in Mendelssohn's Op 44/1 or the wet late-Romantic sop of a very young Anton Webern's "Langsamer Satz" (which means "slow piece," in case the German title impressed you into thinking it indicated something significant).
The other concert, on Saturday, was a must-hear for me because it featured my two absolute favorites of all string chamber music for larger ensembles. Brahms's Op 18 Sextet was a good performance, but I missed the sly and coy elements that make for a great version. First violist Tien-Hsin Cindy Wu showed just a little of the burning grit that enlivened her playing of the second viola part the last time I heard this piece here, four years ago. Mendelssohn's Octet, on the other hand, was all that could be asked for. The players were sorted as two quartets in dialog, which is how Mendelssohn wrote the piece, and the two quartets showed slightly different tone colors. First violinist Benjamin Beilman put all the necessary passion into his solos and drove the rest of the ensemble in speed and energy - with an unusual dark and mysterious quality to the slow and quiet passages.
Also on the program was 180 beats per minute by Jörg Widmann, which I heard here eight years ago in a student performance, at which time I called it "a concise technobeat moto perpetuo with some minimalist sensibility." The professionals put more heft into it than the teenage students did, but not more fire. (The student performance is still online, so I could make the direct comparison.)
Now all is over, and it will be quiet for two weeks until the beginning of Banff, which I'm also attending online only.
I haven't done a word count, but there was some trimming to my Cabrillo review, which admittedly started out at about a thousand words. They cut Anna Thorvaldsdottir's own description of CATAMORPHOSIS; they cut a perhaps too-technical description of the "theme" of the Harrison Concerto for Violin with Percussion Orchestra, which is defined by intervals rather than specific pitches and which functions something like a tone row; I've had to ask for a tiny wording change where they subbed in a word I would not use for what I was hinting at.
ReplyDeleteAaaaaand I had to ask them to yank the photo of Timothy McAllister, who did not appear on the program I reviewed.
ReplyDelete