Remembering Music@Menlo 2008

The Sixth Season of Music@Menlo came to an end on Aug. 8, but the memories will linger on.

The two 11-year-old youngsters in the photo, violinist Stephen Waarts and pianist Michael Davidman, could be poster boys symbolic of what Music@Menlo has brought to the San Francisco Bay Area over the past six years.

These two 11-years-old prodigies, and I rarely apply that term, and never loosely, performed in the last of the Koret Young Performers Concert series on Aug. 6.

One would expect the programs of least interest to the audiences who attend the festival would be those featuring youngsters 11 to 16. But, when I arrived to review this one, there seemed to be as many waiting outside in hopes of nailing an extra ticket as were already seated inside the Stent Family Hall at the Menlo School in Atherton. But, these folks weren’t just wasting time. They knew why they were waiting.

That was because the only place one could expect to hear performances of such quality from the young would be in the finest schools of music in the land. But forget those. These kids were terrific.

The best of the best at this concert were Waarts and Davidman, both of whom were physically small enough they could be blown off of the stage by an overactive air conditioner. But big enough talents in music to just about blow the audience out of its seats.

These two are a duo that was made for each other, twins in the most beautiful interpretive blending of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s "Sonata for Violin and Piano in B-flat Major, K. 454” you may ever hear. I would go anywhere to hear them perform it again.

But that doesn’t at all eclipse the quality of the performers of the other three numbers on the program:

A very early Ludwig van Beethoven work, the "Piano Trio in c minor, op. 1, no. 3” featured Vien Nguyen, piano; Ashvin Swaminathan, violin and Ila Shon on the cello in only the first movement, however.

Pianist Christine Kim; Alex Fager, violin; Rosemary Nelis, violist and Coleman Itzkoff on the cello, understood and gave a beautiful reading of the first movement of the romantic "Piano Quartet in D Major, op. 23” by Anton Dvorak.

And, the concert closed with the "Piano Trio in B-flat Major, Hob. XV: 20” by Franz Joseph Haydn in an appropriately classical period manner by Hilda Huang, Piano; Lily Tsai, violin and Stephanie Tsai, cello.

How did the older musical hopefuls do? These appeared in the Prelude Performance series. I reviewed the session on Tuesday, July 29 and I can tell you, very well. Either of the two groups performing appears to me to be "ready for prime time” professionally.

Liza Stepanova on the piano; Grace Park and Dmitri Atapine on violins did a knockout performance of a late Johannes Brahms work, the "Piano Trio in C Major, op. 87.”

But the musical Oscar that afternoon went to the Hausmann Quartet: Isaac Allen and Bram Goldstein on the violins: Angela Choong, viola and Yuan Zhang, cello.

This is a hugely talented combo whose marvelously rich tone and blending could hardly be surpassed by most of the professional groups in concert today.

It made the reading of the "String Quartet in a minor, op. 41, no. 1,” a work out of the romantic period by Robert Schumann, a very moving and memorable experience that would have made the late composer very pleased.

I don’t know what Music@Menlo will come up with in the seventh season, but they will need to dig harder and deeper to beat this one.