This coming Friday Music@Menlo will begin its 2021 Summer Festival. Nine concert programs have been prepared with plans for both indoor and outdoor performances. The indoor performances will all take place at 4 p.m., when they will also be live-streamed. Each weekend of performances on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday will have its own theme; and all programs have been scheduled to run for about one hour. Program specifics are as follows:
Friday, July 16: The first weekend theme will be “Coming Together.” The major work will be Franz Schubert’s D. 667 (“Trout”) quintet for piano, violin, viola, cello, and bass in A major. It will be preceded by the Scherzo movement that Johannes Brahms contributed to Robert Schumann’s “F-A-E Sonata” project for the violinist Joseph Joachim. (The other movements were composed by Schumann and his pupil Albert Dietrich.) The program will begin with the “Gather” duo for cello and piano, composed last year by Patrick Castillo.
Saturday, July 17: Schubert will again be recognized, this time with his D. 940 fantasy in F minor for four hands on one keyboard. That intense minor-key rhetoric will be preceded by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in the minor mode, his K. 478 piano quartet in G minor. The program will conclude with yet another minor mode composition, the 1952 piano trio in F-sharp minor by Arno Babajanian.
Sunday, July 18: Brahms will be given more attention with his Opus 18 (first) sextet for strings in B-flat major. This will be preceded by György Ligeti’s 1953 sonata for solo cello. The program will begin with Leoš Janáček’s violin sonata, first completed in 1915 but then revised over the years between 1916 and 1922.
Friday, July 23: The second weekend theme will be “Modern Romance.” The spirit of Romanticism will be presented through Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 87 (second) string quintet in B-flat major. This will be preceded by the second (in the key of G major) of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 1 piano trios.
Saturday, July 24: This program will feature two major composers of the later phase of the Romantic period. Johannes Brahms will be represented by his Opus 52a, the four-hand piano version of his Opus 52 “Liebeslieder” waltzes. This will be followed by Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 48 string sextet in A major. Brahms had advocated the publishing of Dvořák’s music, and this sextet was one of the compositions that benefitted from that advocacy.
Sunday, July 25: Passions will run high at the end of this weekend. The program will begin with Brahms’ Opus 60 (third) piano quartet in C minor, the most intense of the three he composed. This will be followed by the equally intense piano quintet that Dmitri Shostakovich composed in 1940, his Opus 57 in G minor.
Friday, July 30: The theme of the final weekend will be “Take Five,” with a quintet scheduled for each of the three concerts. The first of these will be Robert Schumann’s Opus 44 piano quintet in E-flat major. This will be preceded by Georges Bizet’s Opus 22 suite Jeux d’enfants (children’s games), scored for four hands on a single piano keyboard.
Saturday, July 31: The quintet for this program will be Brahms’ Opus 34 piano quintet in F minor. It will be preceded by Eugène Ysaÿe’s “Rêve d’enfant” (a child’s dream). The program will begin with the first (in the key of G major) of Beethoven’s Opus 9 string trios.
Sunday, August 1: The final quintet will be Dvořák’s Opus 81 (second) piano quintet in A major, which will be preceded by Gabriel Fauré’s Opus 13 (first) violin sonata in A major.
Each of the above hyperlinks leads to an event page which, in turn, has a hyperlink for live-stream viewing. Membership is required. Those that are not members will find instructions for creating a membership. This includes creating an account to pay for the concerts. The price of admission for each live-streamed program will be $25.
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