Music @ Menlo
I occasionally receive promotional recordings, either directly from artists or from their representatives. Yesterday in the mail I received a boxed set entitled “Music @ Menlo Live“. Menlo, as it pertains to music, is a summer festival held annually at various venues in Menlo Park, Atherton, and Palo Alto, California.
The festival’s artistic directors are David Finckel and Wu Han, a cellist and pianist, respectively. Finckel is known primarily from his work in the Emerson String Quartet, but he and Ms. Han have made a series of outstanding recordings for a label they both created called ArtistLed. In an age in which the s0-called “major” labels (CBS, Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, EMI, Philips and RCA) have merged into about three über labels (EMI, Universal and Sony) and these three über labels have swallowed up dozens of previously independent brands, often jettisoning their roster of artists, it’s a novel concept to have a label like ArtistLed, created and operated by the performers themselves. Naturally, this concept would not have succeeded in the days before the internet. However, with online shopping rendering the brick-and-mortar record store extinct, and the ease with which distribution can be achieved via the web, boutique and specialty labels are springing up, from ArtistLed to LSO Live. It is refreshing.
So, returning to my new Music @ Menlo box, I am pleased to see that, although the concept appears to be “Returning to Mozart”, the contents are far more diverse, with Bach, Brahms, Britten, Dvorak, Messiaen, Schubert, Shostakovich and Stravinsky all represented. I am especially thrilled to add a recording of Janacek’s Mladi to my collection, plus a version of Le Sacre du Printemps for piano, four hands, and Mozart’s arrangement of five fugues from Das wohltemperirte Clavier for string quartet.
This summer’s Menlo festival begins tomorrow and runs through August 10. The theme this year is “Bridging the Ages”. I think I’ll dip generously into my new boxed set during my shows this week to make the connection.
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