One of the reasons to attend summer musical festivals is that the work of deciding what’s likely to be worth hearing has already been intelligently done for you. In the case of Music@Menlo this is especially true, since the deciders (artistic directors Wu Han and David Finckel, assisted by Edward Sweeney and the rest of their talented staff) always find wonderful new things to combine with favorite old ones. I don’t have the stamina to festivize all day long, so I tend to choose just a few of the offerings, sometimes on the basis of performers and other times for the music, and then my husband and I drive down to Menlo Park for one concert at a time.
This year we went twice: first to hear the Danish String Quartet play a mainly Beethoven program on Saturday, July 26, and then last night to the final concert of the season, a mixed program of Czech and Hungarian composers (this year’s “theme” was Dvorak) played by a mixed group of performers. The Danes, who were introduced to us Bay Areans by Music@Menlo last year, are a remarkable group, and I will always make an effort to hear them play. Last year they debuted with Haydn and Mozart, at whom they excelled. There was one Haydn quartet on this year’s program, and that was predictably great. I felt their Beethoven fell a little short of that level, not for any technical reasons (these guys are perfect players), but because—if I don’t sound too ridiculous saying this—they don’t really understand Beethoven yet. It’s not just a matter of age or nationality. I’m not sure what it is, though the absent element may have something to do with passion, with angst, with negative capability. They are playing the music perfectly well, but it doesn’t seem to alter them: they play Beethoven’s quartets as they would anything else, and that is the problem. Still, I have to allow for the fact that it could have been I and not the players who were off that night.
Last night’s concert, though, made me remember why I go to concerts. Looking at the program, I realized I had chosen it because it included Dvorak’s Piano Quintet with Anne-Marie McDermott at the piano. Every time I have heard this gifted player, I have been delighted and amazed: it’s not just that she is extraordinarily talented herself, but that she is one of the great musical collaborators of all time, and this makes it a constant pleasure to hear her in chamber pieces. I first heard her performing in Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet as part of a Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center event, and it was a life-changing experience. This time she started and ended the program (beginning with Smetana, ending with Dvorak) and left space for two all-string pieces in between, one by Dohnanyi and one by Schulhoff.
The Smetana “Bohemian Fantasy” was a light, amusing piece, played with charm and virtuosity by McDermott and a young Russian violinist, Alexander Sitkovetsky. I was happy enough to hear it but forgot it the second it was over. Then came Erno Dohnanyi’s “Serenade for String Trio,” a piece I had never heard before, featuring Sitkovetsky on the violin, Paul Neubauer on the viola, and Narek Hakhnazaryan on the cello. Composed in 1902, it was a fascinating and compelling mixture of modernism and something else—folk music? romanticism? classicism?—that in its inventive combinations anticipated Bartok and everyone else who followed. I was delighted to be introduced to it, and already feeling grateful to Han and Finckel, when the third piece on the program simply knocked me out. Erwin Schulhoff’s String Sextet (performed here by violinists Nicolas Dautricort and Benjamin Beilman, violists Yura Lee and Paul Neubauer, and cellists Dmitri Atapine and Narek Hakhnazaryan) is one of the most terrifying, moving pieces of music I’ve ever encountered. Filled with silences and near-silences, combining quietly frenzied drones and brief searing melodies, calling forth eloquent solos (especially on the viola), and, toward the end, an eerie slide on the cello that literally raised the hair on the back of my neck, it speaks of the twentieth century and all its horrors. I checked my program for the dates of composition—1920 to 1924—and realized that this young Czech-Jewish composer (he was born in 1894 and died in 1942, a victim of the Nazis) had anticipated Shostakovich by about forty or fifty years.
The Schulhoff piece was so intense that the audience remained silent for a full ten seconds at the end, and I had no idea how we were going to get from there to the rollicking Dvorak, even with an intermission in between. But I should have trusted McDermott and her companions. When the Piano Quintet began, I could immediately sense its kindly, restorative qualities, especially in these highly capable hands. I own the recording of Menahem Pressler’s version of this piece, and I love it, but I think last night’s performance was even better. The Schulhoff had towed us far out to sea and left us nearly drowned; the Dvorak brought us in and restored us to life. I was grateful, and satisfied, and pleased beyond words to be there.