Musicians from Marlboro

MUSICIANS FROM MARLBORO, the touring extension of the renowned Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, offers exceptional young professional musicians from the summer Festival together with seasoned artists in chamber music programs of rarely heard works and masterpieces of varied instrumentation. Each year, more than twenty five outstanding artists take time from their regular activities to bring Musicians from Marlboro concerts to cities around the country. Now in its 42nd season, Musicians from Marlboro continues to offer a far wider audience a sample of the varied programs and spirit of music making so characteristic of Marlboro, prompting the Washington Post to describe Musicians from Marlboro as "a virtual guarantee of musical excellence."

The Musicians from Marlboro touring program has introduced many of today's leading solo and chamber music artists to American audiences, giving many of them their first touring experiences. Among them are pianists Jonathan Biss, Yefim Bronfman, Jeremy Denk, Richard Goode, Murray Perahia, András Schiff and Peter Serkin; string players Pamela Frank, Miriam Fried, Kim Kashkashian, Jaime Laredo, Cho Liang Lin, Shlomo Mintz, and Peter Wiley; flutists Paula Robison and Carol Wincenc; clarinetist Richard Stoltzman; soprano Benita Valente and baritone Sanford Sylvan. Members of today's leading chamber ensembles including the Brentano, Emerson, Guarneri, Juilliard, Mendelssohn, Orion, St. Lawrence, Takacs and Tokyo String Quartets and Eroica and Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trios and Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society credit Marlboro and the touring program as among their most important musical influences.

Typically, tour groups are built around a work performed during a prior summer that Co-Artistic Directors Richard Goode and Mitsuko Uchida and their colleagues feel was so special that it should be shared with others around the country. With five days of intensive rehearsals and six to eight concerts in nine days, the tours offer the young participating artists invaluable experience and exposure – a chance to put into practice what they have gained from their summers in Vermont. I was 18 when I went on my first of several Marlboro tours and it was nothing short of a formative experience for me, wrote pianist Jonathan Biss. 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.

For audiences, the tours provide the opportunity of hearing a wonderful mix of repertoire, discovering young artists destined to become future musical leaders in thoroughly-prepared performances. The New Yorker described the experience of a Musicians from Marlboro concert……….some gifted young artists played a program of more or less unfamiliar but worthwhile music. The experience was so entirely pleasant that I had an uneasy feeling that as a critic I was out of place; the performances were not being given in order to be judged but in order to bring about a rare kind of musical enjoyment.

Founded in 1951 by three families bearing the famous names of Serkin, Busch and Moyse, Marlboro brings together on the Vermont hilltop campus of Marlboro College leading musicians from all parts of the U.S. and many foreign countries for two months each summer. Both young professionals and mature artists come to the tiny town of Marlboro, Vermont at their own expense to exchange ideas and explore together in the depth not possible elsewhere the vast repertoire of chamber music in an informal and intimate setting, removed from the pressures of professional concert life. The legendary Pablo Casals, a principal figure at the Festival for many years, said, "I came expecting a school and found instead a temple of music." Marlboro is now guided by co-Artistic Directors Richard Goode and Mitsuko Uchida, who both participated there early in their careers, as did many of the other distinguished senior artists who play such an important role in each summer's activities.

Marlboro performances can be heard on a series of recordings issued on compact disc by Sony Classical and Bridge Records, including many masterworks of the chamber repertoire as well as some previously unreleased orchestral performances conducted by Casals. In 2000, Sony released a double-CD album including an historic performance of Rudolf Serkin playing Beethoven's "Choral Fantasy" with Peter Serkin conducting the Marlboro Festival Orchestra, in honor of Marlboro's 50th Anniversary, and in 2001, Bridge Records released a 2-CD set containing chamber works by Beethoven, Verdi, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Bartók, Ligeti and Kurtág. The latest Marlboro recording on Bridge Records, released in summer of 2006, features archival performances of Schubert's Trockene Blumen Variations with flutist Paula Robison and pianist Rudolf Serkin; the Prokofiev Sonata for Two Violins, Op. 56 with Daniel Phillips and Peter Zazofsky; and a recently-recorded version of Leon Kirchner's Duo No. 2, premiered at Marlboro and commissioned in memory of the late violinist Felix Galimir, a major figure at Marlboro for some forty years.

In 1993, Marlboro renewed its Composer-in-Residence program. Each season, an exceptional senior and younger composer are invited to attend, enabling Marlboro's participating instrumentalists and singers to gain invaluable insights into their music through direct collaborations. In keeping with the tradition of presenting a broad sampling of the musical works explored at Marlboro during the summer, Musicians from Marlboro touring groups perform works by the Composers-in-Residence throughout the country. The Piano Quintet by John Harbison, who was Composer-in-Residence in 1994, was presented during the 1995-96 season; Gyorgy Kurtág's "Mládí Suite for Winds," which was heard at Marlboro in 1997, was toured during the 1999-2000 season; Leon Kirchner's Piano Trio No. 1, also performed at Marlboro in 1997, was performed on tour during the 2000-2001 season; and Thomas Adès' "Catch," performed at Marlboro in 2000, was heard on tour in the 2003-2004 and 2004-05 seasons and more recently, there have been other works by Ligeti, Kurtag, Kirchner, Dutilleux, Carter and Shostakovich.

Buffalo Chamber Music Society -2008/09 Season