music

Music@Menlo magical in its seventh season

Wind Quintet

Mendelssohn in his element

The magic continued at Music@Menlo Monday, July 28, in the third of five concert programs exploring Mendelssohn’s music and influence. Titled “Midsummer Night Dreams” after his musical setting of Shakespeare’s text, the concert focused on Mendelssohn’s contemporaries, Robert Schumann and Louis Spohr, but opened with a modern work, György Ligeti’s “Six Bagatelles for Wind Quintet.”

Ligeti, a Hungarian composer laboring under a restrictive regime, tuned these short works to the indigenous scales and inflections of his beloved Hungary. Using a lively coloration very reminiscent of Mendelssohn’s orchestration, he restates Ugric vowels into winds, and spoken meter into rapid-fire rhythms, recalling the folk research of Bartók and Kodaly.

William VerMuelen on French horn and Dennis Godburn on bassoon burbled a low underlayment to piccolo shrills, a pairing that invoked manic dance or circus. The false ending and last dilatory burp elicited chuckles from the audience.

Rubato lamentoso, the second bagatelle, was as heartfelt as the first was crazed, with slow minor seconds in French horn and oboe. Their gentle discord shifted to oboe and flute, and then bassoon swelled to gently blanket them. Carol Wincenc took the flute melody, a soaring melancholy line, and oboe, played by SF Symphony principal William Bennett, chattered fragments at her heels.

A lovely moment came when all of them joined in a strident chord, then dropped out, but for the soft sound of French horn, a sweet center in the tart ensemble.

In the third sketch Anthony McGill’s clarinet was cool and bubbly in its lower register as Wincenc glided into ethereality. Their texture thickened with oboe, and VerMuelen‘s French horn slipped in, muffled and buttery.

They turned to the closer discords of ancient Greece, a rollicking Eastern-European drone. Then, after a moving tribute to Bartók, reprised the opening motifs with Hungarian’s rapid diction.

The satisfaction with which these top performers colluded did nothing to disguise their virtuosity, and I had heard of most of them. If you watched the Presidential inauguration you would have recognized clarinetist McGill, who played “Simple Gifts” with Yo Yo Ma in Washington. He is principal clarinetist of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and performed here last summer.

Carol Wincenc, winner of the Naumburg Flute Competition and one of America’s most distinguished flutists, is also a champion of contemporary music. This November she will premiere works by six composers, among them Jake Heggie and Thea Musgrave, at New York’s Merkin Hall.

And William VerMeulen’s international schedule is so crammed that we were lucky to hear him here. When not touring, he is principal horn of the Houston Symphony.

It was no wonder that this work was so joyously performed.

The five winds returned at the end for Louis Spohr’s Nonet in F Major, reinforced by four strings: violin, viola, cello and bass. Spohr is gently playful, if a little ornate for a modern ear. The strings, led by Arnaud Sussman’s agile violin runs, alternated brisk passages with winds.

Spohr was a light dessert after a heavy meal of Robert Schumann. His Piano Trio in D Minor, a powerful Romantic work, was performed by Jeffrey Kahane on piano, Joseph Swensen on violin and Paul Watkins, cello. In this they were too florid, or perhaps too grand for the small chamber, and a quieter intensity may have been more eloquent. And indeed a high point was their soft and shivery “sul ponticello” section.

And Mendelssohn?

Wu Han and Jeffrey Kahane teamed up for a four-hands version of Nocturne and Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and one couldn’t help imagining the young Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn sharing a piano bench, full of sparkle and the audacity of youth, a lightness even in oceanic rollers of bass notes. Mendelssohn was a pivotal figure of his time, and hearing his contemporaries  did not lessen genius, but made it more accessible. The Festival continued all week with a final concert Saturday, Aug 8 at 8:00 at the Menlo Park Presbyterian Church. For more information see www.musicatmenlo.org.

—Adam Broner

This article originally appeared in the Piedmont Post

Photo: (l to r) Carol Wincenc, flute; William Bennett, oboe; Dennis Godburn, bassoon; William VerMeulen, French horn; Anthony McGill, clarinet; photo by Wilson Peters