Friday, March 22, 2019

Music@Menlo 2019 Festival

Congratulations to Music@Menlo: in a season of 55 works, one was composed by a woman!

Considering that their season is arranged by decades, this is...unimaginative and shameful.

(By the way, your web site? There seems to be no way to find a list of the programs with all of the works on each, in chronological order. Stop being so clever and just give people a nice list. I'm lucky that I had a works list PDF so I could just count them, but I have no idea from it how the works are distributed by concert or who is playing them.)

12 comments:

Alex Ross said...

Horrible! Also, "In 1921, Hitler rose to power..." ??

Lisa Hirsch said...

I missed the Hitler line, but yeah, the web site is seriously awful and the lineup....could be so much better.

David Bratman said...

I'm sure what they meant was that "In 1921, Hitler rose to power" over the Nazi Party, which is in fact the true date for that event. I agree it's amazingly misleading, though.

I'm not sure, though, why the air of surprise at Menlo's programming. Menlo has always been about repackaging the same hoary standard repertoire, year after year. They've always done that. Their idea of something daring and spicy is the likes of Suk and Korngold, and by this time even that kind of thing is expected.

Lisa Hirsch said...

Never hurts to call them out about programming. I can also remember years when the repackaging seemed a lot more imaginative.

Their web site has been horrible forever, alas.

David Bratman said...

The first thing I do when the info comes out each year is type up my own schedule file. Otherwise I have no way of keeping track of what's going on at Menlo.

Lisa Hirsch said...

....which should not be necessary.

Alex Ross said...

Indeed, in 1921 Hitler rose to power in a party that had about 3000 members...

Michael Good said...

But could you also praise inclusive programming? There's another local festival this summer with half female composers and significant composers of color, but no coverage here. Why all stick and no carrot?

Lisa Hirsch said...

Uh... because I have not seen this festival'ps press release yet?

Don't be shy! Please provide a link and name the festival.

Michael Good said...

Cabrillo's upcoming season: http://cabrillomusic.org/2019-season-announcement/

Lisa Hirsch said...

And I do not have the press release for the Cabrillo season. Weird; I will try to find out whether I have fallen off their radar.

Lisa Hirsch said...

Very cool season, composer and performer-wise. I will get a blog post up this weekend some time.