Menlo Festival—exploring Contemporary

Final concert shows Music@menlo is simply the best The peninsula’s prestigious Music@Menlo festival capped off three weeks of events with a spectacular final concert, concentrating on contemporary music, and three of the four composers were in attendance. Jennifer Higdon, one of America’s most performed living composers, offered Scenes from the Poet’s Dreams, written in 1999. Five very different moods were evoked by the Borromeo String Quartet and pianist...

Continue reading

Music@Menlo—The Rise of Modernism

Huge Line-up Continues at Menlo Festival Music@Menlo’s fourth concert showcased seven works from the early twentieth century. Debussy ushered in an age of world wars with his Violin Sonata, written in 1916-17, late in his life. Fighting a final illness, he composed this piece with the gentle joy which inhabits much of his later work, using an “impressionist” palette, one of his legacies to music. Ian Swensen, a hometown violinist profiled in the July 30...

Continue reading