Finckel and Wu Han to Retire from Music@Menlo

 

Uncredited photo from Music@Menlo email

Twenty-five years after cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han founded the annual summer festival Music@Menlo, they've announced their intention to step down from leadership of the festival following the 2026 festival. The full press release is here.

I went to a few concerts at the festival back in 2005 and maybe 2006, seeing, among other things, a blazing performance of the Brahms piano quintet, the St. Lawrence String Quartet plus Finckel in the Schubert Quintet, and Jeffrey Kahane giving a talk, playing the Goldberg Variations, taking a lunch break, playing the Diabelli Variations, and answering questions ("I never have to do that again," he said at the Q&A).

Besides work and distance (I live in Oakland), what has mostly kept me away since then is the comparatively staid programming. Yes, great performers, yes, high-quality music, but an almost complete neglect of living composers and minoritized composers of the past. I will never forget Javier Hernandez, of the NY Times, asking Finckel about diversity in programming at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and receiving the answer "I mean, there is more variety and diversity in a single string quartet of Haydn than you can find in about a hundred works of other composers."  It will be very interesting to see who the next artistic director or directors of Music@Menlo will be and what their programming philosophy is.