Elegance emerges at Music@Menlo
Russian-themed concert makes links to the music of Mozart
This year’s Music@ Menlo festival is all about Russian music, but Friday evening’s concert, titled “Elegant Emotion,” started with Mozart.
If that seems counterintuitive, the reasons quickly became clear. Tchaikovsky’s idol was Mozart, who was also a primary influence on the evening’s other composers, Mendelssohn and Glinka.
Making those kinds of links is par for the course at Menlo, the annual South Bay chamber music festival and institute that places high value on context and connections. The festival’s founders, cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han, want their audiences to experience something more than beautiful sounds — although, with the Calidore String Quartet among the featured performers, there were plenty of beautiful sounds on this splendid program at the Menlo-Atherton Center for Performing Arts.
“Elegant Emotion” was an apt title for the program, which started with Mozart’s String Quintet No. 5 in D Major and went on from there to illustrate how the beauty and elegance of the composer’s music had a profound and lasting effect on works by Mendelssohn, Glinka and Tchaikovsky. Even as the evening’s lineup drew intriguing connections among the composers represented, the performances themselves evoked a deep well of feeling that built from one piece to the next as the concert progressed.
If Finckel and Wu Han excel at assembling interesting programs, they’ve also proven adept at attracting top-flight artists to the festival. Dozens of acclaimed chamber musicians are on the schedule this year. But the Calidore String Quartet may prove the hottest of this year’s attractions.
The foursome — violinists Jeffrey Myers and Ryan Meehan, violist Jeremy Berry and cellist Estelle Choi — have been much in the news lately. Founded in 2010 at the Colburn School in Los Angeles, the quartet won two big awards this year: the $100,000 grand prize at the inaugural M-Prize Chamber Music competition, as well as England’s coveted BorlettiBuitoni Trust Fellowship.
In their Bay Area debut on Friday’s program, it was easy to see what the fuss is about. In the first half, the Calidore gave a thrilling performance of Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in D Major, Op. 44, No. 1. The sleek attacks and precision dynamics of the work’s outer movements offered marked contrast to the spun-gold sound of Mendelssohn’s inner writing. The quartet, buoyed by the warmth and eloquence of Myers’ solo violin contributions, brought out the work’s charms in abundance.
They returned in the second half to play Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet No. 1. Tchaikovsky made this luminous 1871 score a heart-on-the-sleeve tribute to his idol Mozart, and the Calidores sounded wonderfully spontaneous in its zesty first movement. The melancholy, often-excerpted Andante cantabile, based on an old Russian folk song, famously brought Tolstoy to tears at one of its early performances; here, it sounded irresistible — exquisitely shaped and filled with emotion. The low strings shone in the third movement, and the foursome blazed through the ebullient finale.
If the evening’s opening performance of the Mozart Quintet paled somewhat in comparison, it still got the program off to a lively start. Violinists Paul Huang and Ani Kavafian, violists Matthew Lipman and Paul Neubauer and former Tokyo String Quartet cellist Clive Greensmith wended their way through the score, from serene introduction to cascading finale, in graceful accord.
Just as rewarding was the brief but beguiling appearance of pianist Michael Brown, who made a delightful traversal of Glinka’s “Variations on a Theme of Mozart” in E-flat Major for Solo Piano. His account of this charming score was sweetly nostalgic and surprisingly touching.
Music@Menlo’s 14th season continues through August 6, with four additional mainstage concerts. And there’s one more chance to catch the Calidore String Quartet, who return July 26 in a Carte Blanche concert titled “The Russian Quartet.” Works by Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Stravinsky are on that program.