David Finckel and Wu Han (photograph by “ralph and jenny” taken at Brock Recital Hall, Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama in 2013, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)
At the beginning of this month, Music@Menlo released a collection of seven albums of recordings made during performances during last year’s summer festival. That occasion marked the first season to be held in the new Spieker Center for the Arts on the Menlo School campus in Atherton, California. My wife and I were living in Palo Alto when this festival was first launched in 2003 by its husband-and-wife founders, cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han.
Ironically, neither of us have ever attended a performance at this festival. When it was first announced, we were not terribly happy with the price; and we already had quite enough satisfying opportunities at our disposal, including venues in San Francisco (particularly in the Civic Center area), the Stanford University campus, and Burlingame, where the Kohl Mansion is located. There was also some sense that the Menlo festival was for New Yorkers trying to get away during the summer months, somewhat in the spirit of the chamber music we had already encountered during our summer visits to the Santa Fe Opera. Mind you, when we lived on “the other coast,” we thoroughly enjoyed the many opportunities available in both Manhattan and Brooklyn. However, we quickly discovered that the West Coast had its own way of doing things; and we had no regrets in putting our past New York experiences behind us.
Nevertheless, I was drawn to the recent release of those seven albums to see if I had been missing anything. Music@Menlo provides the best Web page for the distribution of this content. On that Web page one can purchase the box set of all seven CDs, while each individual CD is available in both physical and digital form, the latter supporting both download and streaming through Amazon.com and Apple Music (the service previously known as iTunes). Over the last several days I have worked my way through the entire content of this offering, and I am afraid that I came away with no regrets at having missed the performances themselves.
The fact is that, with two exceptions, I have encountered every one of the compositions in the collection over the course of past listening experiences. Furthermore, a bit to my surprise, a healthy number of those encounters took place during recitals, rather than just from recordings. The most substantial exception is a piano trio in F-sharp minor by the Armenian composer Arno Babajanian. This is on Disc 3, situated between the violin sonata by Leoš Janáček (Czech) and a solo cello sonata by György Ligeti (Hungarian). That album then concludes with the Opus 57 piano quintet in G minor by Dmitri Shostakovich (Russian).
The other exception is “Gather,” composed for cello and piano by Patrick Castillo. This short (about three minutes in duration) piece was written on request by Finckel and Han for the opening of the Spieker Center, and they presented its first performance. Gather was also the title of last summer’s festival, carrying connotations of being able, once again, to assemble in groups for the sake of playing music. Castillo deftly wove the opening measures of Robert Lowry’s hymn “Shall We Gather at the River?” into the final phrases of his composition. That brief motif added a bit of poignancy to the idea that all of the musicians participating in the 2021 festival were, once again, allowed to gather.
My guess is that the recordings in this collection are most likely to appeal to those that attended last summer’s festival and would like to revive their memories. I am all for such practices, particularly where chamber music is involved. However, having experienced so much of this content in performance, I am afraid that, taken as a whole, these seven CDs left me cool on how the music was being interpreted, if not downright cold.
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