Summertime is chamber music time

Kids are released from school over the summer, and so are musicians — from their teaching positions and/or their orchestra commitments. Of course musicians are perfectly entitled to take the summer off, pitter-patter around the house, install shelving, garden, catch up on movies and reading, motor up the coast, and so forth.

But they can also play chamber music, certainly one of the happiest ways imaginable to create music. When musicians get together to play, and offer tickets, we have a summer chamber music festival, such as the SF Conservatory's now-defunct Chamber Music West.

Add to that lectures, master classes, the training of student performers, and a lot of creative imagination, we've got something like Music@Menlo, which kicks off later this week, on Friday July 18th.

This year's performers include violinist Jorja Fleezanis (pictured to the left), for many years Associate Concertmaster at the San Francisco Symphony (and my colleague at the SF Conservatory), now Concertmaster of the Minnesota Orchestra.

Among the other performers: the SF Conservatory's ace violinist Ian Swensen, master 'cellist Lawrence Lesser (on the faculty at Peabody back in my student days), pianists Jeffrey Kahane (a fellow student of Nathan Schwartz's in the 1970s), Gary Graffman, and Stephen Prutsman, and a host of others.

The lecturers include SF Symphony favorite Michael Steinberg and Juilliard Provost Ara Guzelimian.

A rich schedule of chamber music performances, master classes, recitals, and lectures complement the Chamber Music Institute, which devotes itself to training young musicians.

Festivals like Music@Menlo are priceless treasures in our musical community, offering as they do music-making in which the boundaries between teaching, discussion, rehearsal, and performance are dissolved. Let the summertime bear rich fruit!

Menlo School Campus