MARLBORO, Vt. – The late violinist and violist Philipp Naegele, in the closing essay of a booklet devoted to marking this years 60th anniversary of Marlboro Music, sets his sights on one particularly beloved apple tree. Old and weather-beaten, comely and gnarled, it stands in the middle of the Marlboro campus, surrounded by green hills. Naegele, who came to Marlboro at the very beginning, saw this old yet ageless tree as a survivor whose gift for adaptation and re-rooting mirrored that of Marlboros founders, whom he describes as uprooted idealists from post-war Europe. Six decades ago, they turned this former dairy farm into an oasis of musical idealism and chamber music.
Naegele died this January at age 83 but the tree is still standing. In recent years, Marlboro has been thriving under the directorship of pianists Mitsuko Uchida and Richard Goode. It remains a secluded haven where brightly talented young players perform in ensembles with well-traveled veterans. The players are given as much time as they want for rehearsals and musical exploration, which is itself an enviable luxury.
There can be wonderful public concerts at Marlboro, but as an artist-driven retreat, thats not really the point of the place. Programs are not announced very far in advance. There are almost no amenities, not even air conditioning in the concert hall, and critics seem almost out of place. The feeling for audience members may be a bit like dropping by an elite kitchen to see what the chefs are working on that day. They have prepared some tasty samples. Thanks for visiting.
In Sunday afternoons concert, the caliber of the playing was characteristically high, with one rarity standing out. First up was Brahmss Zwei Gesnge Op. 91, a pair of songs whose unusual instrumentation for piano, voice, and viola forces the musicians to wrestle with a koan of timbre, or how to blend three completely disparate sound worlds. Uchida, Jennifer Johnson Cano (mezzo-soprano), and Helene Clement (viola) gave an enjoyably supple performance that proposed a few different solutions without quite resolving the matter.
Shostakovichs E-minor Piano Trio was brought to life by Bruno Canino (piano), Ying Fu (violin), and Matthew Zalkind (cello) in a muscular account that nudged this musics visceral wildness toward more straightforward expressive ends. And Mendelssohns String Quintet received a solemnly virtuosic reading from Bella Hristova and Nikki Chooi (violins), Clement and Vicki Powell (violas), and Peter Wiley (cello).
But for me most notable was the first Marlboro performance of Zemlinskys fragment Maiblumen Blhten berall (Maybuds Blossomed All Around), a ravishing setting of a dark Richard Dehmel text for solo soprano and string sextet. By virtue of its text, its date (c. 1903) and, most of all, its moonlit world of roiling strings and saturated late-Romantic harmonies, the piece shows a clear debt to Schoenbergs Verklrte Nacht. Susanna Phillips was the excellent vocal soloist, singing Dehmels charged tale of two lovers with a gleaming soprano while the strings surged up around the vocal line in Klimptian swirls. The ensemble playing – by Chooi and Danbi Um (violins), Clment and Sally Chisholm (violas) and Angela Park and Andrew Janss (cellos) – was a model of taste and tonal refinement.
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