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 self-reflection— 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. Composed in the same year as Tchaikovsky’s death and dedicated “to the memory of a great artist,” Sergei Rachmaninov’s Trio élégiaque captures an essential component of Russian musical identity. From Glinka to Shostakovich and beyond, Russia’s composers have depicted melancholia with both a dignified nobility and a devastating dolor. Yet through these composers’ empathy and perseverance, Russia’s musical lamentations likewise extol the indomitability of the human spirit, ultimately uplifting the listener from even the darkest despair. Evident in Mussorgsky’s chilling Songs and Dances of Death, these qualities likewise emerge in the music of Fauré and the Swiss-American composer Ernest Bloch.