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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.
4 comments:
Complaint about the "almost complete neglect of living composers" at Menlo is obsolete. It's not Ojai or anything like it, but in recent years the historical survey orientation of most festivals' programming has not shied away from culminating in the present. For instance, I reviewed the concluding concert of the 2023 festival, consisting of works mostly less than 10 years old, by Wang Jie, Tan Dun, Brett Dean, Jessie Montgomery, and David Serkin Ludwig, two of them commissioned. They were, however, mostly pleasant to listen to, which may disqualify them for the sufficiently rigorous "new music" devotee.
This year, of the dozens of works programmed across 29 different programs, I count five works by living composers and one by a dead woman. I'd consider that "almost complete neglect."
That's "almost complete neglect"? Really?? You want Ojai, and nothing less. Fortunately there is one; can't you be content with there being a multiplicity of approaches? Did you know there are ensembles that don't play anything written after 1750? Or even after 1600? Shocking!
Not at all. I understand their remit to be quite different from that of Ojai.
I am asserting "an almost complete neglect of living composers and minoritized composers of the past." If they had a significant number of works by dead women and nonwhite composers, in addition to more work by the living, that would be great.
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