Chamber music in the U.S. has no more determined champions than Wu Han and David Finckel. The musical power couple were at their West Coast base, the Menlo School in Atherton, on Saturday, Jan. 25, to announce the coming season of Music@Menlo, three weeks of concerts, teaching, lectures, and events running July 18 – Aug. 9.
Usually, the January sneak peek is a donors-only event, but this year, the festival opened it up to loyal subscribers and brought along a quintet of musicians, most of them with connections to Menlo. Framing the season announcement was a mini-concert of Mozart’s String Quartet No. 17, K. 458 (“The Hunt”) and Ernö Dohnányi’s Piano Quartet No. 1. In the Menlo spirit, it was one work you know coupled with one you might not but that proved to be a hit.
As with previous iterations of the festival, the larger theme for 2025 has a poetic touch that enables a wide survey of centuries of music. The title of this year’s festival, “Constellations: Ensemble Magic,” is a pun: heavenly bodies but also varied configurations of instruments. The plan is to move systematically through the basic chamber music groupings to more complex ones. Wu Han and Finckel were forthright about using their lauded recording series, which collects each year’s concerts in a box set, as a library, preserving the classic works of the chamber music canon in great performances.
The basis for the first mainstage concert, July 19, is the sonata — the main form for two instruments. And Beethoven’s Horn Sonata, featuring hornist Kevin Rivard, counts as a rarity. Violinist Stella Chen, who rocketed to stardom in 2019 after winning the Queen Elisabeth International Violin Competition and whose first album won her Gramophone’s 2023 Young Artist of the Year award, plays Camille Saint-Saëns’ Violin Sonata No. 1. Cellist Dmitri Atapine and pianist Hyeyeon Park, co-directors of Menlo’s Young Performers Program, handle Felix Mendelssohn’s Cello Sonata No. 2, and clarinetist David Shifrin rounds out the program with Francis Poulenc’s Clarinet Sonata.
And so it goes. The second concert program, July 20 and 22, features trios by Brahms, Antonín Dvořák, Josef Suk, and Bedřich Smetana. Program III, on July 26, is devoted to music for winds, including rarities by German American composer Charles Martin Loeffler and Austrian composer (and contemporary of Richard Strauss) Ludwig Thuille. That’s followed by quintets on July 27 and 29 and quartets on Aug. 1.
Then, Program VI, on Aug. 3, promises a star-studded vocal music concert featuring the Menlo debut of soprano Tony Arnold, vocalist with the International Contemporary Ensemble. With the fantastic Viano Quartet, she performs contemporary composer Brett Dean’s String Quartet No. 2 (“And once I played Ophelia”). Mezzo-soprano Maire Therese Carmack, a winner at the 2022 Operalia competition, sings Brahms’s Two Songs, Op. 91, and joins baritone John Moore for the two-piano version of Leonard Bernstein’s Arias and Barcarolles. Moore also sings Samuel Barber’s Dover Beach.
The last program, Aug. 7 and 9, offers two well-loved masterpieces, Brahms’s String Sextet No. 1 and Felix Mendelssohn’s Octet, along with Jörg Widmann’s challenging 180 beats per minute.
The three Carte Blanche recitals this year are given by violinist Kristin Lee (who continues her investigation of American music pursued on her latest recording), violinist Benjamin Beilman, and pianist Gilbert Kalish, who celebrates his 90th birthday with a performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire featuring Tony Arnold and Menlo regulars. As always, the Prelude Performances by artists from Menlo’s International Program are free, as are the Koret Young Performers Concerts, but tickets are required.
The performers on Saturday afternoon were as excellent as expected. Violist and Menlo faculty member James Thompson, collaborating with violinists Anna Lee and Jason Moon and cellist Andrew Ilhoon Byun, played the Mozart with nicely pointed phrasing and detail. The four were then joined by pianist Yun Janice Lu for the Dohnányi.
Dohnányi’s quintet, written when the composer was still a teenager, received praise from none other than Brahms, who arranged for its first Vienna performance. It’s an inventive work with a final movement that pulls out all the stops: a main theme in 5/4 meter; a gracious, nonacademic fugue; and then a brief return of the first-movement material — all of it scored with a delicacy that supposedly caused Brahms to exclaim, “I could not have done it better myself.” The performance was everything you could ask for.
