Music@Menlo Names Next Directors

Dmitri Atapine (left, with cello) and Hyeyeon Park (right, at piano)

Cellist Dmitri Atapine and pianist Hyeyeon Park will be the next directors of Music@Menlo, succeeding cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han. Their first season will be 2027; Finckel and Wu Han will conclude with the 2026 season.

You can read the full press release here. DB at Kalimac's Corner has commentary as well.

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.

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.

Music@Menlo 2020

UPDATED: Because I counted and originally published the 2019 numbers.

Well, I've got an email from Music@Menlo, and....wow, their roster of artists is something else. On this page, there's a 3 x 16 grid of artists, plus a row of 2 that is, 50 photos in the grid. There are 48 individuals and 2 string quartets, so, 56 individuals. Of these, 14 are women. (This is slightly better than 2019.)

That's completely astonishing, in 2020.

Of the works on the regular series of eight concerts, not one is by a woman. Not going to bother looking over the Carte Blanche and other series.

Good work, Music@Menlo!