Schedule:

Tuesday, August 5, 2025

11:00 a.m. - Mornings@Menlo
Martin Family Hall

Mornings@Menlo convene the entire festival community for hour-long master classes and Café Conversations, led by Music@Menlo faculty and artists. Mornings@Menlo are free and open to the public in Martin Family Hall; reservations are not required. All sessions are livestreamed on Music@Menlo’s website.

5:00 PM - Prelude Performance XI 
Spieker Center for the Arts 
Tickets: Free

PROGRAM

W. A. Mozart(1756–1791)
 String Quartet in E-flat major, K. 428 (1783)

Josef Suk(1874–1935)
 Piano Quartet in A minor, op. 1 (1891)

Artists

VIOLA

 Sofia Gilchenok
 Stephen “Adam” Savage

PIANO

 Bo Zhang

CELLO

 Sameer Apte
 Sara Scanlon

VIOLIN

 Ariel Horowitz
 Tianyou Ma
 Eric Tsai

7:00 PM - Encounter Lecture IV
Moonstruck: The Amazing Story of Schoenberg’s “Pierrot lunaire”
Martin Family Hall
Tickets: $50 full-price | $25 under age thirty

The Jim and Mical Brenzel Encounter Series invites you to go beyond the concert hall and explore the heart of chamber music. Led by top musicians and thinkers, these evening talks explore the themes of each festival with great stories, insights, and musical moments. Whether you’re a longtime fan or just getting into chamber music, you’ll come away inspired.

Arnold Schoenberg’s chamber melodrama Pierrot lunaire experienced a tumultuous premiere on its way to becoming a twentieth-century classic. Ara Guzelimian returns to recount the origins of seventeenth-century commedia dell’arte and its famous character Pierrot, the sad clown. From there, he tells the story of the legendary first performance of Schoenberg’s work as well as the highly charged reaction of the Berlin audience. With festival musicians demonstrating some of the work’s highlights, he will explore the expressive power of Schoenberg’s music in performance.

Artist

ENCOUNTER LEADER
 Ara Guzelimian