AFTER DEATH THEMES, POSTLUDES TOWARD A 2ND LIFE
                                              By D. Rane Danubian
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music
                                                                 Week of Aug. 18-25, 2003
                                                                  Vol. 6, No. 6
        MENLO PARK---After the first week on the classics, Music@Menlo was hell bent for leather, storming the barricades of contemporary music via its closing programs of Aug. 17-18.
        The earlier concerts had already established the high musical credentials of these chamber players and recitalists lined up by Artistic Directors (and performers) David Finckel and Wu Han from around the US.
        This latest foray underlined the versatility and proficiency of the players in very difficult pieces technically, but without making a strong case for the vitality of 21st-century creativity in this genre.
        Most festivals start and end on a resounding, vibrant upbeat. Han-Finckel instead closed their foray with an evening on themes of death, implying that perhaps this was, simultaneously, Music@Menlo's first and last season.
        Not so, it turned out. Asked about the likelihood of continuance in August, 2004, Finckel replied, "Absolutely!" This despite the inherent drawbacks of small venues (with a breath-taking $60 top ticket), the bad economy, first-time marketing, and the inevitable doldrums of summer music.
        Those very doldrums were the spur to Music@Menlo, stepping in to fill the vast two-month-long serious-music void with which the Peninsula and South Bay are beset almost every year.
        "If we didn't have this, we'd have to go to San Francisco," noted one local patron, cringing at the prospect of the 60-mile roundtrip involved.
        Ned Rorem's 28-minute song cycle "Aftermath" made for a very heavy conclusion, with reflections on dying from many different poets of the past. The 10 songs struck me as austere, forbidding and rather short on spectral colors; a recurrent falling theme in the earlier songs suggests a descent from life, along with limited variety. Baritone Nathaniel Webster, with a firm, well-projected voice, could produce the passion of Rorem's lines, but little warmth. And the piano trio was given very little to add beyond what a routine piano accompaniment might have provided.
        In sheer fury, Rorem and the colleagues were all overwhelmed by the angry "Yiddishbbuk" by Osvaldo Golijov, 43, one of the hot avant-gardists on the East Coast scene. This was a hair-flying, leap-from-your-chair type exercise for string quartet, representing what I took to be rage over the loss of various individuals, ranging from children of the Holocaust to Leonard Bernstein, who died at 71 in 1990. Golijov offers harmonics, bowing on the wood, extreme dissonance, and a controlled chaos of instruments very spiritedly employed by the St. Lawrence String Quartet. I'd almost swear I saw sparks flying from the violin bows.
        Bright Sheng's "Four Movements for String Trio" used sliding tones encountered in Chinese classical music in a very meaty East-West multicultural amalgam, done by a New Yorker who lived in China through his high school years. There are harmonics, microtones, and other wonders. I was especially struck by the hard downward strokes of the bows, done ever so slightly staggered, in the finale. Synchronizing them of course is much easier---but the composer was looking beyond that too-familiar horizon.
        Evocations of the past recurred in the program. John Harbison's "Nov. 19, 1828" sounded like neither Harbison nor Schubert, suggesting a new stylistic plateau for the versatile 65-year-old composer from the Eastman School faculty. He tackled one of the music world's grand unfinished puzzles, a musical counterpart perhaps to Fermat's Last Theorem: a fugue theme on Schubert's name proposed to the latter by his mentor Sechter. Schubert's death at age 31 preceded his working out the challenging fugue. So now, over a century and a half later, Harbison did a development-compilation in a modern style, highlighted by four firm chromatic strokes repeated in the strings to set the stage.
        Here Harbison-Schubert enter a distant, even estranged harmony world new to us, as played forcefully by the string trio of Jorja Fleezanis, Geraldine Walther and Carter Brey, plus the consummate chamber pianist Gilbert Kalish.
        Cellist Finckel also contributed a seamless solo rendition of John Corigliano's look at a different famous predecessor, "Fancy on a Bach Air," in which, true to the title, Bach was very much in the air.
        I didn't see the scores closeup, but some may have sported wet ink; the oldest piece, Harbison's, was only 15 years old.
        The concert unfolded in the elegant ballroom of the Menlo School's Stent Hall---I could visualize Viennese balls here, back when this was a private home. The room offered superlative acoustics but a tiny capacity (about 150) which could force a lesser series into rapid bankruptcy.
       Music@Menlo, a chamber-music series in Menlo School, Menlo Park and Palo Alto, Aug. 3-18; delayed nationwide broadcasts over Minnesota Public Radio. For info: (650) 725-2787, or online.
        ©D. Rane Danubian 2003
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        D. Rane Danubian has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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