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.

Diversity in Opera

It's a common stance among U.S. classical music and opera lovers to wish that state and federal support  for the arts reached the levels of such support in Europe. I've thought for a while that this would be a double-edged sword: a government that gives money can take away that money. We're seeing the depredations of Arts Council England in the UK, where subsidies for many important organizations has been cut back and the English National Opera is being forced to decamp from London, where they've been performing for the last 80 years, first as Sadler's Wells Opera, then as the ENO.

Not that private philanthropists can't do the same, plus there's generational change about what the rich give to: these days, what's popular is donating huge sums to medical research or hospitals rather than the arts.

Regardless, one good thing about lack of government support means that there's not much to take away and an organization that's dedicated to expanding their repertory past dead white European men and to casting people of color in leading roles can't be pressured by the government to stop doing these things. (Here I'll note that San Francisco Opera's excellent productions of Omar and El ultimo sueño de Frida y Diego sold very well, and making your audiences happy is good.)

I was thinking about how racism manifests itself in the performing arts. There are all sorts of ways: thinking you can't cast Black men as romantic heroes, assigning fewer solos in concerts to singers of color, failing to admit singers of color to important training programs, the economic inequality that makes it easier for people with money than people without money to pay for music or voice lessons and buy good instruments, treating students of color differently, and on and on. 

Other than in Porgy and Bess, I did not see a production with more than one Black singer on stage until 2017! I've now seen enough productions with one to many Black or Asian singers to know that it's absolutely not for lack of good singers of color. And there are some outstanding Black singers I've seen in the last few years who didn't have careers at major U.S. opera houses until they were approaching or past 50.  I expect that most people reading this are aware that star singers are usually established by age 35, so that's a lot of prime earning years lost. 

DEI works the same way in the arts as anywhere else: expanding the pool of talent means you have more choices about who to hire, and generally results in quality going up. Having fewer mediocre white people in the corner suite or on stage benefits us all.

A Few Articles to Read Together

Regular readers know that I have been rolling my eyes at Music@Menlo's programming for the last ten years or so. The festival directors, Wu Han and David Finckel, work pretty much in the dead-white-European-male canon, even when there are obvious opportunities to break out of that particular line of programming.

The pair are also directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Weirdly, the one time I saw them in SF, they played a new song cycle and Amy Beach's piano quintet, the sort of thing various people wish they'd do more of.

CMS's season opener led to the following:

• Review: Chamber Music Society Returns, Unchanged, by Zachary Woolfe. Subhead: The organization opened its season with a program encapsulating a persistently conservative vision of the repertory.
• Chamber Music Society's Leaders on Balancing Old and New, by Javier Hernández. An interview that contains a ton of gobbledegook, including the ridiculous claim by Finckel: "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." W the actual F. This is a willful dodge around what "diversity" means.
• Diversify the world of classical music? Some key players are digging in their heels, by Joshua Kosman, wielding a very sharp pencil.
  
• Catalyst Quartet shines a spotlight on the chamber music of Black composers, also by Joshua Kosman. Lack of diverse programming means omitting a lot of terrific music from our concert halls.
  
• The Programmatic Lightness Of Being, by Drew McManus at Adaptistration.
  
• There's plenty of mockery of the CMS/LC on Twitter, as well.

Rolling My Eyes, part 285

Found in The NY Times:

On Monday, for the first time in its 138-year history and as it returned from an 18-month closure, the Metropolitan Opera presented a work by a Black composer: Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” By opening the season with this work, the Met filled a gaping hole in its repertory at a time when the performing arts are rightfully being challenged to become more diverse. 

Here are all of the operas that the Metropolitan Opera has performed that weren't written by white men:

• Der Wald, Ethel Smyth (2 performances)
• L'Amour de Loin, Kaija Saariaho (8 performances)
• The First Emperor, Tan Dun (12 performances)
• Fire Shut Up in My Bones, by Terence Blanchard (7 performances)

That's 29 performances, total, of four operas. For contrast, looking at the Met's repertory report, La Boheme has gotten a total of 1344 performances, Aida 1175, and, scrolling way down past dozens of works, La Damnation de Faust and Der Freischütz have each gotten 30.

Staging Fire Shut Up in My Bones isn't filling a gaping hole. It is going to take years to do much about those gaping holes.

Monday Miscellany

Various odd ends I've had floating around.

• Philip de Oliveira, writing in Scene, tells it like it is with the Cleveland Orchestra (and oh so many others): After 100 Years, the Cleveland Orchestra Continues to Ignore Women, Minorities, and Living Composers. The comments...well, mostly, don't read them.
• Jill Radsken discusses composer Shirley Graham's Tom-Tom: In 1932, this opera was hit. Why has no one seen it since? The answer to that question is pretty easy!
• The Beeb tells you about some women who've been erased from music history.
• Dennis Polkow bemoans the sacrifice of a broad operatic repertory in favor of musicals at Lyric Opera of Chicago.
• Justin Davidson on the Met Semiramide, which I liked a whole lot. 
• Jenna Ross at the Star Tribune: Minnesota music scene finally amplifying women composers.
• Aubrey Bergauer of the California Symphony: A Public Commitment to Diversity. "Because we have to start somewhere and be willing to be held accountable." Yep, yep, yep. And every orchestra should be doing this.
• Malcolm Guy, Boston Globe: Area musicians call on BSO to diversity programming. (The BSO's recently-announced 2018-19 season is markedly better than previous seasons.)
• Oldie but goodie: In the wake of the Levine allegations, the BSO planned to review its sexual harassment policies. Considering that their way of dealing with Dutoit was to warn women not to be alone with him....