The sounds of music
Toolbox
Published: July 31, 2009
ermonters are settling into summer, conscious of the abundant life around them. But it's not just the teeming life of the woods and the rivers and lakes. Emanating from the countryside in many places is a richness of music ordinarily heard in the concert halls of Vienna, London or New York. Here it is woven into the landscape as finely as the song of the birds.
The opportunities to hear fine music are plentiful. There are small concerts in village churches. There are grand concerts at Shelburne Farms and other pastoral venues of the Vermont Mozart Festival, such as the Trapp Family meadow. There's the summer sojourn of the Craftsbury Chamber players in the old Hardwick Town Hall.
One of the best known of these magical musical interludes is Marlboro and the festival there that brings together some of the world's greatest musicians.
Marlboro Music is the sort of institution that Vermonters might take for granted. It was established in 1951 at Marlboro College, the tiny liberal arts college in a converted dairy farm in the hills above Brattleboro. A small band of émigré musicians sought to create an enclave where young musicians could devote a summer to the study and practice of the music of the great masters. These Marlboro pioneers included Rudolf Serkin, Adolf and Herman Busch, Marcel Moyse and his son, Louis, and Louis's wife, Blanche Honegger Moyse.
They were acclaimed musicians of international stature, and they wanted to establish a haven away from the commercial pressure and publicity that distracted professional musicians from the music itself.
At Marlboro this year about 80 young musicians from around the world have gathered for a few weeks of playing that represent a rich personal and professional opportunity for them. There they are under the tutelage of, among others, pianists Mitsuko Uchida and Richard Goode, co-directors of Marlboro Music.
In a recent issue of The New Yorker magazine, Alex Ross wrote an extensive and elegiac description of life at Marlboro under the guidance of Uchida and Goode. It appears to be a combination of summer camp and utopian kibbutz dedicated to the hard work and joy of music. Uchida and Goode have taken Marlboro Music beyond its initial period when the spirit of Serkin pervaded the hills of Marlboro, but in Ross's telling the new directors are no less beloved.
Marlboro Music embodies some key Vermont characteristics. It does not aspire to a high profile in the larger world. It does not make strenuous efforts at publicity. But for Vermonters concerts offered on weekends provide an opportunity to hear music as soulful and accomplished as they could find anywhere.
On a recent Saturday evening, the cars making their way up the hill to the parking lot next to the concert hall showed more New York or Massachusetts license plates than those from Vermont. Marlboro remains a quaint rural destination for classical music aficionados downcountry. But Vermonters were there as well.
They heard a richly lyrical string quartet by Frank Bridge. They heard a piano quartet by Mozart with Uchida at the keyboard and 86-year-old David Soyer on cello. They heard a string quintet by Brahms. All demonstrated the accomplished chamber playing that is the hallmark of Marlboro.
Other opportunities for classical music abound "hidden" in Vermont, but well worth searching out. Wednesday night a dozen students at the Adamant Music School performed as it rained outside, spreading a warm summer glow through Waterside Hall that contrasted with the damp outdoors. The music was stunning in its range and quality, from Scriabin to Liszt, Bach Beethoven and Chopin, a delicious Whitman's sampler of young musicians from Montreal to Washington state, Cape Town, S. Africa and Brooklyn, N.Y. If there is a better $6 to be spent in Vermont, it's hard to imagine where; absolutely certain is that there's few prettier settings than the pondside sculpture gardens at Adamant (where a few more concerts remain this summer).
As Ross pointed out in his article, the setting at Marlboro is not far removed from the settings around Vienna from which so much of the greatest music emerged. Hearing Mozart, Beethoven. Bach or Schubert surrounded by the hills of Vermont, and away from the pressures and clamor of the larger world, one hears the music as it might have sounded in the 19th century.
These are among the riches of a Vermont summer. One hopes that the focused and talented musicians finding their muse in Vermont's hills understand fully the degree to which their labors are appreciated by those in the world beyond the boundaries of their summer haven.
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