The title of Music@Menlo’s 2016 festival season, Russian Reflections, captures a variety
of perspectives on this season’s programming. Russia’s history is vividly reflected in its
music. Russian Reflections also refers to the parallels between Russian musical works
and their Western European counterparts. And finally, Russia’s great artists, across
disciplines, have contributed some of the canon’s most compelling works of selfreflection—
from Tolstoy’s War and Peace to Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and
from Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence to Shostakovich’s Piano Trio no. 2. Such works
represent these artists’ lucid and often poignant looks at themselves as a people and a
nation. By juxtaposing Russian masterworks with those of the West, as with the pairing
of quintets by Sergei Taneyev and Johannes Brahms on Disc 6, we discover that the very
elements that distinguish Russian music—passion, romance, elegance, and more—are
in fact universally resonant themes. Through each disc of Music@Menlo LIVE’s 2016
edition, these and other perspectives cast Russia’s musical identity in sharp relief, while
also revealing an essential character that transcends any cultural divide.

Disc 7 begins with the piquant pairing of Mozart, the paragon of the Classical period,
whose String Quintet in D Major demonstrates his music’s characteristic elegance
and beauty, and Prokofiev, the mischievous neoclassicist who channeled the aesthetic
of a bygone era to create irrepressibly fresh music. The program concludes with the
magnificent Suite no. 2, op. 17, by Sergei Rachmaninov, Prokofiev’s compatriot who,
similarly, looked Janus-like to the tradition of his forebears as his art marched inexorably
into the new century.