By Paul Hertelendy 
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of July 27-Aug. 4, 2011
                                                                  Vol. 13, No. 119
              MENLO PARK, CA---Music@ Menlo, the ambitious elite chamber-music series on the Peninsula, is devoting its ninth season mostly to music of Brahms-----hardly newsworthy, to be sure. But the July 26 concert actually featured music of a living composer for a change----John Harbison---along with a late-Schoenberg violin fantasy that could render  the somnolent wide awake. Plus a clutch of earlier music.
                The series is on the pricey side, with prime tickets running $65. But many East Coast artists are featured. And the location, not far from Stanford University, is in an affluent area, selling out the 500-seat concert hall despite (or because of?) a relatively adventurous program.
                 The artists are mostly veterans who double as faculty for emerging young musicians of proficiency enrolled in the developing-talent realm.
                  Among the best of these established artists is the Canadian pianist Lucille Chung, whose deft timing and punctuation was immediately evident in both the Harbison Piano Quintet (1981) and the Schoenberg violin-piano “Phantasy.” Her intelligent pianism could cut through the curtains of strings out front, even the whole quartet of densely bowed contrapuntal strings of the Harbison, showing her special prowess, yet without dominating. Harbison is tonal and harmonic, with constant rhythmic shifts. In his more rambunctious moments, he sought to break with the traditional and predictable, much like the work of visual artist Georgia O’Keeffe, to whom the piece was dedicated. Much of the work is enigmatic, as if intended for a “Twilight-Zone”-like episode of the nebulous and the unfathomable.
                   Playing the immensely difficult violin part of the Schoenberg “Phantasy” (1949) was San Franciscan Ian Swensen, hitting the extremes of the dynamic range, and wrestling with the 12-tone music of which Schoenberg had been the high priest in its controversial heyday.
                      Far more to the audience tastes was the Rachmaninoff “Vocalise,” featuring not the original voice, but rather  violin & keyboard, with Swensen at the forefront. There was also Lawrence Loesser to play the unaccompanied Bach Cello Suite No. 2, at various turns ruminative and reflective, including the powerful and unforgettable Sarabande—nobility suffused with tragedy.
                    The concert closed with Chung and her husband Alessio Bax collaborating on Brahms’ Two-Piano Sonata in F Minor, essentially an arrangement of Brahms’ great Op. 34 Piano Quintet. It was chordal-monumental, if not inordinately sensitive.
                   Cramped far too long in small concert spaces of Palo Alto and Menlo, Music@Menlo is now focused for the second year in the attractive, modern 500-seat Menlo-Atherton Center for the Performing Arts.
                    As an added lagniappe for the audiences, Music@Menlo also offers a young-performers concert a couple of hours before each mainline guest-artist concert.
                    All in all, this is a series to relish under the guidance of New Yorkers Wu Han and David Finckel. Adding a few living composers to the mix, along with a commissioned world premiere, could add greatly to M@M’s  allure during these summer months, when Peninsula audiences usually have little culture to feast on.
                    Music@Menlo chamber-music festival, July 22-Aug. 13, mostly at the  Menlo-Atherton Center for the Performing Arts, with programs changing nightly. For info: (650) 331-0202, or go online. 

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           Paul Hertelendy 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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