I've never had a strong interest in attending the Verbier Festival, which strikes me as a gathering-together of well-known classical names to no particular purpose. Since most of these musicians travel through New York on a regular basis, I don't need to cross the ocean in order to see them play more or less the same pieces in more or less the same configuration. Last year, Gidon Kremer denounced the festival's "misguided fixation with glamour and sex appeal," and the brochure for the 2012 edition suggests no change of heart: one sees many ostensibly good-looking stars from so-called major labels, vast quantities of standard nineteenth-century repertory, and an almost total lack of post-World War II or contemporary fare. There are, in fact, two living composers listed in some fifty programs: Charlotte Bray and Vasco Mendonça. The latter's name is misspelled.
