As they prepare to step away from Music@Menlo after 25 years, Wu Han and David Finckel speak to Juliette Barber about the artistic principles that have shaped their partnership, and why, in their world, nothing is ever just a concert
Spend an hour with David Finckel and Wu Han, and it quickly becomes clear that what has made them two of the most influential figures in classical music is not ambition, but certainty. Certainty about what music demands, who it belongs to, and what it requires of those who serve it.
As Artistic Directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (CMS) since 2004, and founders of Music@Menlo – Silicon Valley’s acclaimed chamber festival – the couple have reshaped the landscape of chamber music in America. They have built institutions, trained a generation of performers and arts administrators, pioneered musician-directed recording and curated more than 275 concerts a year across the CMS network. They have also maintained a high-level performing career throughout.
“We are musicians first,” Wu Han explains. “David has just been performing Don Quixote. I am about to go to the first rehearsal of two new piano quintets. Last week I gave the world premiere of a piece I commissioned – a companion to Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, but about endangered species. The more the two of us expand as musicians, the more exciting the artistic programming becomes.”
The calling
For Finckel, the word that best describes what drives them is not passion, not purpose – it is calling.
“From when I was very young, everything in music has felt like a calling to me,” he says. “When I first heard the Saint-Saëns Cello Concerto, it called out to me to learn it. When I first heard Wu Han play, it said: I have to make music with this person. Starting Music@Menlo was the same — an enormous calling. It happened very soon after September 11th, very soon after violinist Isaac Stern died. All of a sudden there was nobody in his shoes, and people were looking at us the way we used to look at him.”
What binds the couple, he says, is that there has never been a calling that one of them wanted to answer and the other did not. “We don’t do anything that people make us do. We do things that have called out to us because they need us. And that brings us great joy and gives us great direction as an artistic team.”
Wu Han sees it a little differently. “David and I share a core value that has never been in doubt: we are always in the service of the music. Because we share that belief, the decision-making is very pure, very centred.”
Serving the composer
One of the most significant influences on their thinking came long before either institution existed. In the late 1970s, as a young cellist, Finckel was taking lessons with legendary cellist Mstislav Rostropovich – then at the height of his American celebrity.
“Rostropovich firmly believed that our job as performers was to serve the composer,” Finckel recalls. “As he used to say: come to the stage as the composer, represent the composer. You don’t hear that commonly taught in conservatories today. We tell people what finger to put where, but the purpose of walking on stage – who you are, what your role is – has never been made clearer to us than by Rostropovich.”
Finckel has his own way of bringing this to life for his students. “I ask them: when you get up to heaven and Beethoven comes to you and says, why did you make that crescendo two bars early when I didn’t write it there – what are you going to say? Are you going to say, I thought it sounded better that way? No. You’re going to be humiliated. So don’t take chances with that stuff.”
It is, he says, a North Star that runs through everything: CMS, Music@Menlo, the Bowers Program, the way their musicians approach the stage. “When you come to the stage, it’s not about you. It’s about the composer and their music.”
Programming: music first, casting second
At CMS, Music@Menlo, La Musica and the Society of the Four Arts, the artistic process begins in a place that might surprise those who assume name-led programming is the norm. “We never say, X is a great violinist, let’s find out what they would like to do,” Wu Han says. “Programming comes first. Casting comes later.”
The question is always: who is best suited to serve this music? “If it’s French music, the artist needs to have a gorgeous sound and shimmering vibrato. If it’s passionate Russian music, the artist should have a big, fat sound. It comes from that same principle – the musician serves the music.”
When the alignment is right, she says, audiences feel it even if they cannot name it. “People say, wow, you know how to produce a concert. But it’s coming from a very simple principle. Because the principle is so strong and the casting is so good, people know something special is happening. Even the untrained ear knows: I want to hear that again.”
Finckel describes their role in the concert hall as something close to diagnostic. “If you’ve ever been in an intensive care unit, you know that they hook you up to machines that monitor every part of your body. When we’re at Chamber Music Society, we have the whole place hooked up that way. We have our finger on the pulse, checking the blood pressure, the temperature, the emotion. The two of us are very sensitive – and something I still don’t understand about us: we can listen to a concert in different parts of the hall, come together afterwards, and have exactly the same reactions.”
He is candid, too, about the risk that comes with the privilege of artistic leadership. “When you walk on stage and play the cello, you take chances – people want you to take chances. As administrators, we have succeeded much more often than we have failed, but not without sticking our necks out almost all the time. In the old days when people charged into battle on horses, it was always the lead guy on the front horse that took the fall. That’s kind of what we do. It’s scary, it’s exciting, it’s fun, but we know that someday we may begin to lose our ability to predict. Until that day, we’re still going to be at the front of that charge.”
Mentoring and the art of being a good citizen
The Bowers Program at CMS – a three-season residency for emerging professional musicians – and Music@Menlo’s Chamber Music Institute have, between them, launched careers and nurtured a generation of chamber music presenters and arts leaders. At the last count, Menlo alumni had started more than 30 of their own projects; from the festival’s Arts Management Internship programme alone, which has trained over 300, former participants now hold senior roles across the sector, from artistic administration to leadership roles at major orchestras.
The philosophy behind all of it, Wu Han says, is inseparable from the nature of chamber music itself. “To be successful in chamber music, you need the most generous spirit, the most collaborative devotion, the commitment to being a good citizen of a community. That’s the essence of chamber music-making. For the younger generation, that’s what they need to be – not thinking about how much money you can make or how famous you can become. That’s not interesting or important. It’s thinking: what can I bring to the table? What can I do for the people around me?”
The decision to invest as seriously in training arts administrators as in performers grew directly from that belief. “We understand that if you don’t have good people working in the music industry, none of the musicians will succeed,” Wu Han says. The Music@Menlo internship programme was designed to give young people who might be interested in making art flourish the chance to be close to the artistic source – to learn best practice, to have it rub off on them.”
Finckel reaches for an analogy that is both unexpected and immediately apt. “There are many cultures that butcher an animal to eat and use every single bit of it. For us, it’s very unnatural to make a concert and then look at it and think: it’s just a concert. If you have great music and great artists in one place, it’s inconceivable not to make the most of that – through education, through engagement, through access. You start to think: a pre-concert talk would be good here. If we’re rehearsing, some students could come and listen, and things expand naturally from that. So if we start another festival someday, it would be inconceivable not to have an educational component for young musicians or for adult audiences. The two of us are always going to eat the whole animal.”
Wu Han laughs. “Just recently at La Musica Chamber Music Festival (of which Wu Han is Artistic Advisor), so many people came up and said, your concert was so interesting, I want to learn more, so I added a two-part lecture programme. When we’re surrounded by people who are excited and want to engage, we can’t help ourselves – it’s a terrible disease.”
Audiences: nourishment, not novelty
In the post-pandemic era, the performing arts sector has been awash with talk of reimagining, disrupting and reaching new audiences through radical change, but this is something that does not resonate with Finckel and Wu Han.
“After the pandemic, the mantra was: you must be different,” Finckel says. “I said to myself, I don’t need to be different. If I could just get back to being who I was before the pandemic – which, by the way, didn’t change at all during it – I’ll be very happy to carry on.
“My vision of what I’m put on earth to do best has not changed in 25 or 30 years. And I’m not ashamed of that. Because the art form I love is some 500 years old.”
ArtistLed: art before commerce
The story of ArtistLed – the first musician-directed, internet-based recording label, launched in 1997 – begins, as many of their best stories do, with a chance encounter.
“Wu Han and I had been making recordings for nobody except ourselves,” Finckel recalls. “I have an affliction where I tend to try to make something great and then figure out what I’m going to do with it. Totally backwards, businesswise. But when you’ve made something great, the thing itself impels you to do something with it.”
In 1996, Finckel found himself at dinner at The Ivy in London, seated next to a woman he hadn’t met before. He told her about a recording he and Wu Han had made of the Strauss and Franck cello sonatas – how proud he was of it, how they had controlled every element of the editing, the sound quality, the relationship with the engineer, without a label or executive telling them what to play. “She said, without much hesitation: ‘I could put it on the cover of my magazine.’ I said, ‘Oh, what magazine is that?’ She said, ‘BBC Music Magazine.’ I’d been sitting next to Fiona Maddocks, who was the editor at the time.”
The following morning brought a handwritten letter confirming she was serious. The January 1997 issue was published with the CD on its cover. “That prompted an emergency meeting between me and Wu Han and our manager: do we use this to attract a major label, or do we go out on a limb and make the first artist-directed, internet-headquartered recording company – even though people will think we’re crazy? Fortunately, we chose the latter. Less than six months after the magazine came out, we were getting calls from orchestras in San Francisco and Minnesota who were all thinking of starting their own labels.”
The label now sits at the heart of something larger than recordings. “Everything we do is artist-led – it’s the principle that informs almost all of our decisions, even business decisions. ArtistLed is part of our individual email addresses, but it’s much more than a recording company. It’s a way of conducting ourselves as artists, so that we may make a difference and leave a legacy of change.”
At CMS, they have built an archive of more than 2,000 high-end video productions since 2012. Music@Menlo has recorded live performances of more than 640 chamber works across nearly 200 CDs over the past 24 years. “Our generation of musicians needs to be captured, to be documented,” Wu Han says. “It is our mission. Like David said – we are called to it.”
Calling time at Music@Menlo
This summer’s Music@Menlo season will be their last as artistic directors. Twenty-five years after they founded the festival in the aftermath of September 11th, they are handing it to a new generation of leadership.
“We founded this baby,” Wu Han says. “We gave birth to it. But at some point, a child has to go out and find its own way. We vowed never to get into ‘founders’ syndrome’ – where somebody stays a little too long. That’s the worst-case scenario and we never wanted to be there.”
The timing, she insists, is deliberate. “To celebrate Menlo’s 25th anniversary is the perfect moment to say: let’s celebrate together for the next generation of leadership, rather than mark the end of David and Wu Han’s era. That’s terrible! It’s all about positioning – giving new directors Dmitri Atapine and Hyeyeon Park the best possible platform, making sure everybody shows up to celebrate the festival and falls in love with them.”
Finckel expands on that. “It’s not so much that they’ve been trained by us – they’ve been trained by the festival itself. They’ve both been there for at least a decade.
“They know how it works. They know all the people. They’re not strangers.”
The feeling of loss is evident, however well concealed. “We’ve spent a big part of our life every summer for four weeks in that community,” Wu Han says. “It will be very strange. But it’s the right thing to do, and we just have to do it. We don’t know what we’re going to do next summer. David was just writing the artistic director’s message to the whole community, and he said: we don’t know what comes next, but we know our phone will ring. There’s a suspense there, which makes it more fun.”
The next chapter
In January 2026, Finckel and Wu Han assumed the artistic directorship of South Mountain Concerts in Pittsfield, Massachusetts – a chamber music series founded in 1918 by the American patron of the arts Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge.
“When our predecessor Lou Steigler began to hint, at 96, that his last season was coming, we panicked at the thought of someone coming in and changing what had been so carefully built, “explains Finckel, who has performed at the festival more than 60 times since the early 1980s. “When we were proposed as his successors, we didn’t hesitate. We have made a promise to that audience: the South Mountain Concerts you know and love will continue.”
It is, in its way, as clear an expression of their philosophy as anything else they have done – not reinvention, not disruption, but the understanding that to carry something of this quality and history forward intact is, in itself, an act of artistic leadership. Which is, perhaps, the simplest way to describe everything Wu Han and David Finckel have done across 25 years of institution-building: they’ve answered the call, served the music, and trusted that everything else would follow.
To discover more about the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s current season, visit chambermusicsociety.org.
To find out more about Music@Menlo’s 2026 season, visit musicatmenlo.org
Visit La Musica and The Society of the Four Arts for more information.
