{"id":15908,"date":"2024-07-30T15:26:39","date_gmt":"2024-07-30T19:26:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/?p=15908"},"modified":"2025-03-25T15:35:09","modified_gmt":"2025-03-25T19:35:09","slug":"review-newly-discovered-octet-gets-west-coast-premiere-at-musicmenlo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/review-newly-discovered-octet-gets-west-coast-premiere-at-musicmenlo\/","title":{"rendered":"REVIEW: Newly Discovered Octet Gets West Coast Premiere at Music@Menlo"},"content":{"rendered":"

From San Francisco Classical Voice<\/a><\/p>\n

By David Bratman<\/p>\n

Music@Menlo\u2019s mainstage concert on Saturday, July 27 expressed this summer\u2019s theme \u2014 French chamber music in a broader context \u2014 by pairing French and American pieces composed between 1896 and 1936. The French works were by Maurice Ravel, the emblematic composer for this year\u2019s festival. (The next day, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet gave a marathon recital of all of Ravel\u2019s pieces for solo piano.)<\/p>\n

The festival was fortunate in getting the Viano Quartet to play the sole string quartets of Ravel and Samuel Barber. The Viano players have an extraordinary facility with 20th-century music, and both of these pieces came out splendidly and with searing memorability.<\/p>\n

The Viano took the bulk of Ravel\u2019s well-known String Quartet in F Major with a light delicacy far removed from the torpor that the piece\u2019s lurid harmonies can sometimes descend into. This approach, which came near to reverence in the slow movement, made a strong contrast with the music\u2019s more energetic excursions. The beginning of the finale was fierce, even slashing, before relaxing into a gentler idiom. The scherzo begins with, and frequently returns to, bursts of pizzicato from all four instruments. It\u2019s difficult to make pizzicato notes slash fiercely through the texture, but the Viano Quartet managed that.<\/p>\n

Barber\u2019s String Quartet in B Minor, Op. 11, was an even finer performance. This piece is in the form of a sandwich, with two outer movements made of the same material: fast, crusty, and querulous. Nicholas Swett\u2019s program notes use the term \u201cchromatic squiggles\u201d to describe the melodic line here. The creamy filling is the slow movement that Barber would later orchestrate as the famous Adagio for Strings.<\/p>\n

The Viano Quartet surprised listeners with its treatment of both of the score\u2019s modes. The outer movements, for all their squiggling, were strongly lyrical and melodic as well as declarative. They were filled with rich harmonies between the players and equally rich double stops produced individually.<\/p>\n

The warm geniality in the outer movements prevented the Molto adagio from getting lost between them. Nor was this movement itself anything to be forgotten. This was a performance of gentle solemnity, with all the weight of the orchestral arrangement. The melodic line \u2014 starting on Lucy Wang\u2019s first violin and elegantly passed on to Aiden Kane\u2019s viola before being taken up in turn by the others \u2014 was smoothly carried out as it extended on and on, generating the feeling of breathing. After all, Barber was a major composer of vocal music.<\/p>\n

Read the full review.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From San Francisco Classical Voice By David Bratman Music@Menlo\u2019s mainstage concert on Saturday, July 27 expressed this summer\u2019s theme \u2014 French chamber music in a broader context \u2014 by pairing French and American pieces composed between 1896 and 1936. The French works were by Maurice Ravel, the emblematic composer for this year\u2019s festival. (The next … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11826,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3612,7252],"class_list":["post-15908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-review","tag-viano-quartet"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15908"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15909,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15908\/revisions\/15909"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/11826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}