{"id":1258,"date":"2023-07-26T09:50:45","date_gmt":"2023-07-26T16:50:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/?p=1258"},"modified":"2023-07-26T10:37:05","modified_gmt":"2023-07-26T17:37:05","slug":"two-surprises","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/two-surprises\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Surprises"},"content":{"rendered":"

Though I’ve had some surprises from Music@Menlo<\/a> in the past (most notably when they introduced the Danish String Quartet on these shores), I find myself attending their concerts mainly to have my high expectations fulfilled. Predictably\u00a0excellent performances of good chamber music programs\u00a0are not something to be sniffed at, and these summer festivals\u2014run every year in Menlo Park by the folks who also run CMS<\/a> in New York\u2014almost always fit that bill.<\/p>\n

So I had no ambitions beyond the usual pleasure-seeking ones when I traveled down the Peninsula last Sunday to hear Concert Program III, entitled “From the Heart.” Though it\u00a0was part of a summer season devoted to Beethoven, there was no Beethoven on this program: just Schubert, Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, and a name I had never heard before, Louise Farrenc. The composers sounded fine, but the draw for me lay in the roster of performing musicians\u2014especially Nicholas Canellakis, a\u00a0terrific cellist whose career I’ve followed since its very beginnings, a couple of decades ago.<\/p>\n

In the event, Canellakis was as entrancing\u00a0as always, and so were his fellow players in the Farrenc piano quintet: Orli Shaham on piano, Arnaud Sussmann on violin, Matthew Lipman on viola, and Anthony Manzo on bass. They played as if they had been playing together forever, not as if they had simply gathered for this one piece; and they played the\u00a0music itself as if they had known it all their lives, which they couldn’t have done, because Farrenc is not a\u00a0composer any of them would have heard of in\u00a0their conservatory days.\u00a0This nineteenth-century Frenchwoman\u00a0had no doubt been dug up from the archives as part of the current\u00a0desperate\u00a0search for female composers, and this time someone\u00a0managed to strike\u00a0gold.<\/p>\n

That was the first surprise: how absolutely wonderful\u00a0Farrenc’s\u00a01839\u00a0Quintet in A minor was. I won’t say it rivaled Shostakovich’s or Brahms’s or Schubert’s piano quintets, but it came pretty damn close. Every movement of the half-hour piece brought something exciting and new, especially in the interplay among the musicians. It was never merely pretty (the way, I’m afraid, the Schubert string trio that opened the program was); there was something somber even behind the liveliest passages, and something witty behind the pensive bits. Because I’d never heard it before in my life, I had trouble grasping it fully, but I was gripped by it and thrilled to be hearing it.<\/p>\n

The Farrenc\u00a0was played right before the intermission, and during the pause I wondered why\u00a0it hadn’t been placed last, since it was such an obvious hit. But then I got my answer. Felix Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio No. 1, the final piece on the program, was the second surprise of the day.<\/p>\n

You wouldn’t think that such an old chestnut could surprise anyone anymore\u2014especially me, who listens to it repeatedly in the marvelous\u00a0Beaux Arts Trio version. But I hope\u00a0the beloved\u00a0ghost of Menahem Pressler will\u00a0not be rattled if I say that\u00a0this live rendering was even better than my favorite recording. Part of the credit goes to the sensitive pianist, Juho Pohjonen, and the eloquent cellist, David Requiro, both of whom I’ve heard at CMS or Music@Menlo before. But a great deal of the effect,\u00a0and the primary source of my surprise,\u00a0lay in the performance of the violinist, Francisco Fullana. A young Spaniard with degrees from Juilliard and USC and prizes from all over the world, he plays with a fiery intensity that makes itself visible throughout his whole body (including in his hilariously glittery shoes). His large hands\u2014in fact, his whole large person and personality\u2014seemed to dwarf the borrowed 1735 Guarneri instrument he plays,\u00a0even as they brought forth the most beautiful, tender, ecstatic notes from it. It was almost as exciting to watch<\/em> him play as it was to hear him. There is a special feeling\u00a0you get when you first hear a great musician in performance, especially if you are not expecting it, and that is what happened to me on Sunday with Fullana. I can’t wait to see and hear what he does next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Though I’ve had some surprises from Music@Menlo in the past (most notably when they introduced the Danish String Quartet on these shores), I find myself attending their concerts mainly to have my high expectations fulfilled. Predictably\u00a0excellent performances of good chamber … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[691,689,34,693,696,694,692,695,690,697,522,688],"class_list":["post-1258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-lesser-blog","tag-anthony-manzo","tag-arnaud-sussmann","tag-chamber-music-society-of-lincoln-center","tag-david-requiro","tag-felix-mendelssohn","tag-francisco-fullana","tag-juho-pohjonen","tag-louise-farrenc","tag-mathew-lipman","tag-music-at-menlo","tag-nicholas-canellakis","tag-orli-shaham"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1258"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1266,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1258\/revisions\/1266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}