MENLO PARK, Cal. — Music@Menlo, the Silicon Valley chamber music festival that has managed to bloom in what was once a musical desert in the summertime, has always come up with different umbrella themes. Usually they have centered on composers or key words, places, historical continuums. The programming has tended to be on the conservative side, in harmonic terms at least, while at times reaching for neglected repertoire within that framework.
After 22 seasons, it may have become increasingly, and understandably, difficult for Menlo artistic directors/co-founders David Finckel and Wu Han — who are stepping down after the 2026 season — to come up with new ideas for Festival No. 23. Yet they’ve managed to squeeze out a novel concept this summer: a numbers game. They started with a program for just two instruments, gradually altering the possibilities with programs for a trio, a quintet, a quartet, and finally a sextet and octet on Aug. 9, topping things off with that favorite of chamber-music festivals everywhere, the great Mendelssohn Octet. In between the quartet and sextet/octet offerings, they inserted a marvelously wide-ranging outing called “Let’s Add Voices!’ on Aug. 3 — and that’s the one I chose to take in.
Some things have changed in Menloland since my last visit there before the pandemic shutdown. After bouncing around various nearby venues in Silicon Valley, Music@Menlo has a new home for the main concerts in the posh Menlo School’s Spieker Center for the Arts. Inaugurated in 2021, the 380-seat modified-shoebox room has all of the technical bells and whistles that new halls usually have these days, and its comfortably dry acoustics suit chamber music pretty well — certainly better than their previous homes did.
Music@Menlo Live, the ongoing, most extensive chamber-music recording project of all time, has abandoned the CD, migrating to digital-only formats under the direction, as always, of producer and maverick sound engineering whiz Da-Hong Seetoo. I’m not sure when this practice began, but the house lights were turned on during the entire performance (thank you!!) so that curious concertgoers could read the printed texts as they listened.
“Let’s Add Voices” offered not-often-heard vocal pieces in an intriguing series of contrasting styles and configurations — and things did get a bit far out here and there. The program started with a selection of Weber’s Scottish National Songs for the unusual combination of baritone, flute, violin, cello, and piano, very engaging pieces with alternately militant and tender flavors and texts by Walter Scott and Robert Burns. These songs could be considered precursors to Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn (Mahler must have known the territory, having completed Weber’s unfinished opera Die drei Pintos as a young man). Baritone John Moore sounded most attuned to the military selections with his commanding delivery, while pianist Wu Han, flutist Tara Helen O’Connor, violinist Julian Rhee, and cellist Nicholas Canellakis provided expert support.
In another world was Brahms’ Two Songs for Mezzo-Soprano, Viola, and Piano, Op. 91, set in the composer’s most consoling mode. Mezzo-soprano Maire Therese Carmack displayed a deep liquid timbre, and Tien-Hsin Cindy Wu (replacing Paul Neubauer) essayed the viola parts with passionate soul. The subdued piano work came from Menlo stalwart Gilbert Kalish, whose 90th birthday in July was celebrated with a special concert Aug. 6.
Moore found his lyrical footing in Samuel Barber’s concert song Dover Beach for string quartet and baritone, which the composer, an able baritone himself, actually recorded in 1935. Violinists Erin Keefe and Rhee, violist Wu, and cellist Finckel made up the quartet. Then Brett Dean’s String Quartet No. 2 for soprano and strings from 2014 injected some jangling, yet refreshingly abrasive nerves into the program. The third movement found the Viano Quartet driving especially hard and fast, roiling and raving as if this were Shostakovich’s death-haunted Symphony No. 14 behind soprano Tony Arnold’s highly dramatic, nearly overwrought delivery of the Hamlet-based text.
To top it off with a real eclectic circus, there was a rare performance of Leonard Bernstein’s last completed major work, Arias and Barcarolles, in its original version for baritone, mezzo-soprano, and piano four-hands. With texts mostly by Bernstein (one is credited to his mother, Jennie), there is a lot of autobiography in this half-hour-long song cycle, particularly in the “Love Duet,” which contains lines that are quintessentially irrepressible Lenny: “Why can’t I give up smoking?” “Should I discard my lover?” “Why are the nations raging?”
The score has plentiful helpings of Bernstein’s underrated melodic gift, his feeling for the American jazz that he grew up with and occasionally played, allusions to his past works (particularly the Jeremiah Symphony), his always-ambivalent experiments with twelve-tone writing, and his deep urge to make Important Statements in music. The fifth song, “Greeting,” whose text was curiously missing in the printed handouts, struck a most poignant note, for Bernstein originally wrote it in 1955 for the birth of his only son, Alexander, who died at 70 just 12 days before this concert.
Moore and Carmack were a well-matched duo, batting the lines back and forth in the duets for married couples, communicating with each other in physical movements as well as in song. Moore made meltingly lyrical work of the song for Alexander’s birth, showing tenderness and vehemence in the Yiddish-language “At My Wedding.” Pianists Hyeyeon Park and Gloria Chien negotiated the changes in style flawlessly. Although where they were supposed to sing the hepcat scat syllables that begin and end “Mr. and Mrs. Webb Say Goodnight,” they deferred to Moore and Carmack, who scatted them instead. In all, Bernstein’s last major testament couldn’t have received a better performance.
