MARLBORO — As Marlboro Music gears up to begin its 66th season, the world-famous institution where master artists play with exceptional young professional musicians marked the final month of the 50th anniversary of the Marlboro Music Touring Program.
Marlboro Music establishes four groups that tour each year. Three of the tours play in select cities on the East Coast, including New York, Boston and Philadelphia. The fourth tour, usually made up of performers from the three regional tours, plays further afield in North America, in cities such as Toronto, Montreal, and the San Francisco Bay area.
Legendary pianist Rudolf Serkin, Marlboro Music's artistic director until his death in 1991, established the institution in 1951 with co-founders Adolf and Herman Busch, and Marcel, Blanche, and Louis Moyse.
Today, Marlboro Music continues to thrive under the leadership of Mitsuko Uchida, artistic sirector since 1999.
The idea is simple enough.
After three weeks of intense daily rehearsals in the summer in rural New England, Marlboro Music presents a portion of its musical collaborations at weekend concerts, held from mid-July to mid-August at Marlboro College. Here, audiences have an opportunity to see dynamic young musicians playing side-by-side with master artists.
Beyond the music
Serkin believed that what musicians learned at Marlboro went beyond music into life lessons.
Frank Salomon, Marlboro Music's administrator since 1960, explains.
“Through studying in chamber groups,” Salomon says, “artists learned how to play their parts while following the score. That meant learning how to listen and compromise, and how to become supportive of partners. This knowledge becomes vital personally and professionally.”
Salomon believes this is one reason musicians who studied together at Marlboro Music became so close.
“We have 64 marriages that resulted out of collaborations at Marlboro Music to prove my point,” he says.
The most inspired of these collaborations become the foundation for Musicians from Marlboro Touring Program.
“The tour is really an outgrowth of what the musicians do here in the summer in Vermont, in which a group takes weeks to explore a piece of music,” Salomon says. “Although young and seasoned musicians are playing together here for the first time, they sometimes form a special organic ensemble.”
A member of both the Juilliard String Quartet and the faculty of The Juilliard School, violinist Samuel Rhodes says, “In each of the 13 Music from Marlboro tours in which I have taken part since 1969, the most important element for me has been the various musical journeys involved. The groups are usually built around one or more works studied and performed during the summer.
“There would always be an intense rehearsal period of 10 days to two weeks before actual performances. During that time, all of us are immersed in that particular universe represented by the music we are studying. It is almost like all outside events, some of them important, some trivial, don't exist. The group forms a special bond that eventually results in life, credibility, and spontaneity to our performances.”
Building on the remarkable
Salomon says, “When a performance at Marlboro Music feels remarkable, a touring ensemble is build around that piece. We first go to the experienced musicians in the group to see if they think a tour is a good idea. If so, a complete concert program needs to be created which will complement the piece developed at Marlboro Music.
“Since the artists need to create a viable program, and considering that the senior musicians already have concerts booked in the near future, the tour takes a while to get off the ground. For instance, the pieces developed at this year's Marlboro Music won't tour until the 2017-18 season.”
The idea of the tour originated with William Judd, Rudolf Serkin's manager.
“Judd realized something special was happening in Vermont, impressive music-making that people elsewhere didn't have the opportunity to experience,” Salomon says.
“Chamber music was not as popular then as now,” he continues. “Audiences had few opportunities to see professional chamber music, except for random string quartets or piano trios, chamber groups from Europe who occasionally would tour the country, and music lovers would have to experience chamber music from faculty performances at the local university.”
Through Marlboro Music Touring Program, wider audiences gets the chance to hear “impassioned and thoroughly prepared pieces that began at Marlboro music, and this is not just string quartets or piano trios but a varied repertoire for chamber and voice,” according to Salomon.
He also believes the tours to be very valuable to the young musicians who perform in them.
Music across generations
The tour offers young artists vital experience and exposure and the chance to perform with members of major string quartets like Emerson or Juilliard, and with principals from major symphony orchestras.
“Young musicians grow as they get experience and exposure, while putting what they learned at Marlboro into use,” Salomon says. “The tour also teaches them how to learn from one performance to the next and to develop over time the concept of a piece, all the while adjusting to variable pianos and acoustics of halls, not to mention adjusting to arduous traveling. The more seasoned musicians can teach younger ones practical things too, like what to pack when you travel, or to be sure to take your vitamins.”
Many senior members at Marlboro Music began as young artists themselves.
“Two-thirds of the artists now performing at Marlboro were young artists here themselves,” Salomon says. “This establishes a tradition and continuity of music-making. For instance, violinist Samuel Rhodes was in two of the three tours of our first season and the center of the national tour that year when he was a young musician at Marlboro Music. 50 years later he comes back for the anniversary tour.
“Through him, musicians can connect with a musician who was with Marlboro in the early years when it first started. On tour, Rhodes performed the Alban Berg Lyric Suite (1926), which he first learned from Felix Galimir when he was in his quartet.
“What is so significant about this is that Galimir formed a quartet with his three sisters in Vienna, and they made a recording of the Lyric Suite supervised by Berg himself. This recording won the prestigious Grand Prix Award, as did another of their recordings, this of a piece by Ravel, which too was supervised of its composer. My point is that Rhodes is passing the baton as young Marlboro musicians get a lineage from Rhodes through Galimir back to Berg, the author of the Lyric Suite.”
Formative collaborations
Musicians (many who later became celebrated artists) remain passionate about their experiences in the Marlboro Music Touring Program when they were young artists.
Violist Steven Tenenbom, whose first of 15 tours was in 1980-81 before he helped form the Orion String Quartet, says Musicians from Marlboro “taught me not only the basics of touring, it showed me how to bring the highest musical values to an audience that is being increasingly deprived of the deeply thoughtful and expressive music making which is the hallmark of the Marlboro Festival.”
Pianist Jonathan Biss, whose first tour was in 1998-99 when he was 18, found Marlboro Music Touring Program to be “nothing short of a formative experience.” He explains, “I'd had very limited performing experience at the time, and it was certainly the first time I went on the sort of tour where one repeats the same repertoire in each city.
“If Marlboro had been an unmatchable opportunity to study a piece over time, Musicians from Marlboro was a chance to learn about a piece through the simple act of playing it repeatedly - a different kind of lesson, but no less valuable.”
'Because of Marlboro'
Hilde Limondjian, program director of concerts and lectures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for over 40 years, says, “My internship at Marlboro in the summer of 1964 deeply influenced the series I was to program at the Metropolitan Museum. The Guarneri, Marlboro, and the Beaux Arts series were direct results, while many more events took place because of Marlboro.
“As an example, in a three-concert series, the St. Luke's Orchestra was conducted by Alexander Schneider, Leon Fleisher, and James Levine, and the piano soloists were Rudolf Serkin, Mieczyslaw Horszowski, and Peter Serkin, all Marlboro luminaries.”
Finally, violinist and conductor Jaime Laredo, who was in the very first group of the initial season in 1965-66, exclaims, “I fell in love and married Sharon Robinson! That's what I call a life-altering tour!”