David Finckel and Wu Han found the right time to present a Music@Menlo program that revisits their more than two-decade tenure as the Atherton chamber music festival’s artistic directors.
“This idea of looking back and sampling past thematic ideas, past summers, has been around for quite a while,” Finckel says. “When we decided we should pass the festival on to new leadership, the idea of this festival all of a sudden seemed doubly appropriate, and that it would be a way for us and our audience to look back over 24 festivals. It also leaves the 25th festival as a point of departure for the festival, for our new leaders, and it all seemed to fit very nicely.”
“Redux,” their celebratory retrospective running July 17-Aug. 8, includes seven programs, a full cycle of Beethoven’s piano sonatas and “Encounter” talks with musical masters. It’s also a bridge to the 25th season in 2027 when cellist Dmitri Atapine and pianist Hyeyeon Park — married, as are cellist Finckel and pianist Wu Han — take over as artistic directors.
“Each of the programs represents an entire summer from the past within a single program, and that’s something we’re very happy about … these seasonal designs we have created are able to be reimagined and reinvented in myriad ways,” Finckel explains.
The festival kicks off July 17 with students from the Music@Menlo Chamber Music Institute in a Prelude Performances; CMI students also present three Koret Young Performers Concerts starting July 25. Also on tap is the first “Encounter” with former Metropolitan Opera Orchestra principal flutist Michael Parloff, one of 44 renowned artists featured this season.
The opening concert on July 18 is “The Glorious Violin.” While it would be impossible to encompass all the composers and repertoire for an instrument that has been around 500 years, Finckel and Wu Han had a plan for an appropriate presentation.
“We decided to make a program that bookended two golden ages with the violin, and one of them is the Baroque, and what better way to do that than with Vivaldi’s incredible violin concertos comprising ‘The Four Seasons,’ and then jumping to the absolute height of romantic violin, playing compositions by Kreisler. I think between these two eras and two styles between Kreisler and Vivaldi, the whole story is there — you can just fill in the middle all by yourself,” Finckel says. The concert also includes works by Mendelssohn and Rimsky-Korsakov.
After “Being Mendelssohn,” a July 19 program of works by the early Romantic era composer, the first of Swiss-born American pianist Gilles Vonsattel’s five performances of Beethoven’s piano sonatas begins on July 23. Vonsattel plays the full cycle of 32 sonatas on July 30, Aug. 6, a special concert on Sept. 9 and then finally on April 18, 2027, at Stanford University’s Bing Concert Hall.
Vonsattel, who has appeared with leading international orchestras and performed Beethoven’s demanding, visionary Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor at Music@Menlo in 2022, precedes each of his recitals with a lecture on Beethoven’s genre-changing compositions.
As a two-year endeavor, the Beethoven cycle represents a fitting bridge to Music@Menlo’s 25th season. Wu Han says the genesis of the production began during the pandemic when she and Vonsattel were in the same musicians’ pod performing piano four-hand pieces and producing videos together.
“Gilles did the most amazing concert before the pandemic of all the late piano sonatas, and I heard the last sonata and was just smitten by his interpretation,” Wu Han says. “It’s very rare for me to like somebody else’s Beethoven because I’m picky. So during the pandemic all musicians were desperate and I said to Gilles, ‘Why don’t you use this time to learn all 32 of them?’ To commit to perform all of them is a life-changing commitment, and the first thing Gilles said was, ‘I got to check with my wife.’ Then maybe a month later he said, ‘Yeah, I’m committed.’ So we scheduled it.”
“From Bach,” modeled on a 2011 concert showcasing how the Baroque master’s works inspired those who followed him, is on July 24-25 featuring works by Bach, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Brahms and the living composer John Corigliano.
Pianist-composer Stephen Hough plays his Piano Quintet “Les Noces Rouges” in Music@Menlo’s “The Unfolding of Music” program on July 26 and July 28. (Music@Menlo via Bay City News)
On July 26 and July 28, the festival then reprises a theme from its inaugural year in 2003 with “The Unfolding of Music” detailing the evolution of music from the Baroque to the modern era. The chronological journey includes works by Telemann, Beethoven, Schumann, Bartok and the West Coast premiere of pianist Stephen Hough’s Piano Quintet “Les Noces Rouges” with the composer at the piano.
In their capacity as artistic directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in New York, Finckel and Wu Han commissioned Hough to compose the folktale-inspired “Les Noces Rouges,” which he and the Viano Quartet — the same ensemble at Music@Menlo — premiered there in November 2024.
“I loved the piece so much as soon as I heard it premiering in New York that I said it has to come to Menlo and I would love to learn it myself,” Wu Han says. “The music is incredibly powerful, and to have a pianist, a real musician, a player, as a composer. is a huge plus. The usage of the piano and of the string quartet, the chord selections — it’s really spectacular.”
On July 31 and Aug. 1, “Resonance” features works by Telemann, Suk, Liszt, Tchaikovsky and the living composer David Serkin Ludwig, recalling a 10th season concert that focused on the listener.
In 2006, the festival celebrated the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth; the giant again will be the focus of “Returning to Mozart” on Aug. 2. The performance intentionally places Mozart’s Violin Sonata No. 32 in B-flat major and Piano Concerto No. 13 in C major after pieces by Mahler and Shostakovich.
“There is something about this returning to Mozart, which is something people often express that the last music they want to hear on earth is Mozart,” Finckel says. “I think that once again into the bridge idea, Mozart’s music has many times served as a kind of bridge to the afterlife, to a better life, and because it has this divinely inspired quality about it, which is very different.”
The festival concludes Aug. 8 with “Schubert,” recalling the 2015 immersion in works by the prolific Austrian composer with his monumental Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat major and Octet in F major for Winds and Strings.
As Finckel and Wu Han prepare to step down, they are confident that Atapine and Park, who are no strangers to the community as performers, concert hosts and leaders of the Koret Young Performers Concerts program, will be superb successors.
“It’s the best transition I can imagine,” Wu Han says. “We spent a whole year with them, and they are just incredible people — so smart, so engaged and with such great character and detail-oriented, and tremendous amount of energy they already pour into Music@Menlo. So we are very proud and very relaxed about this.”
Music@Menlo presents its 24th season July 17-Aug. 8 at the Spieker Center for the Arts, Martin Family Hall and Stent Family Hall on the Menlo School campus, 50 Valparaiso Ave., Atherton. Tickets, including for livestream access, are $25-$150 at (650) 331-0202 or musicatmenlo.org.