There are two kinds of music lovers: those who attended Music@Menlo’s last season and want to relive the experience and those who somehow missed the festival. 100 percent of this population will delight in the publication of Music@Menlo LIVE’s Russian Reflections, eight individual CDs, also available as a boxed set and digitally.
The name of the set is also the title of the 2016 festival, “Russian Reflections,” celebrating the cultural dialogue between Russia and the West from which “Russian classical music grew into one of the most powerful of all musical genres.” The festival featured chamber music by Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Sergei Taneyev, and Shostakovich, along with Mozart, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and other great composers, pointing to and demonstrating relationships.
The live recordings from the festival’s 14th season feature some of the most acclaimed chamber musicians in the world, including festival founders/artistic co-directors Wu Han (piano) and David Finckel (cello), pianists Alessio Bax, Gloria Chien, Lucille Chung, Alon Goldstein; violinists Ivan Chan, Nicolas Dautricourt, Paul Huang, Katie Hyun, Ani Kavafian, Alexander Sitkovetsky; double bassist Scott Pingel, flutist Tara Helen O’Connor, baritone Nikolay Borchev, and soprano Dina Kuznetsova.
Russia’s history is vividly reflected in its music, and the 2016 LIVE recordings celebrate one of the most remarkable and artistically rich traditions in Western classical music, from the twilight of the empire through the revolution and into the Soviet era.
Performances include Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence and Serenade in C Major, Rachmaninoff’s first Trio elegaique, works by Alexander Scriabin and Cesar Cui, Modest Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, and Shostakovich’s Spanish Songs. You can listen to excerpts from these and other performances on the collection at the Music@Menlo LIVE site.
The recordings were produced by Grammy Award-winning engineer Da-Hong Seetoo. A Curtis Institute and Juilliard School trained violinist, Seetoo ranks among today’s elite audio engineers, using his own custom-designed microphones, monitor speakers, and computer software. His recording with the Emerson String Quartet for Deutsche Grammophon, Intimate Letters, garnered the 2010 Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance.
The 2016 edition of Music@Menlo LIVE is available in downloadable digital format as well as on disc. Downloading and streaming are available through a variety of online digital music retailers and streaming services including Amazon.com, iTunes, and Spotify. Music@Menlo LIVE's entire catalogue, comprising live recordings from all of Music@Menlo’s past festival seasons, can also be found online.