"We Are All Students"

The most exciting chamber music recitals in the U.S. originate in a wooden box in a small, white clapboard cottage in Vermont. Into the box go requests for performances of everything from Mozart to Schoenberg; out of the box come twice-weekly concerts played in a converted cow barn by some of the world's most famed and gifted instrumentalists. Last week the barn echoed to Beethoven's Sextet in E-Flat, Martinu's Three Madrigals for Violin and Viola and Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 5. Occasion: a concert at Vermont's Marlboro Festival, now celebrating its tenth season.

The festival was born in the minds of Pianist Rudolf Serkin, Flutist Marcel Moyse land the late violinist Adolf Busch.

All three were living near the nearly deserted hamlet of Marlboro, the entrance to which is designated by a crudely painted sign: "Cows in Road." In 1950 they were approached by tiny Marlboro College (50 students), which had been established in 1947 on 600 acres of deserted farm land on Marlboro's Potash Hill, and offered the use of the college's buildings for summer musical events. Serkin saw a chance to set up the kind of musical community he had dreamed of for years--a place where instrumentalists could play together, free of normal concert pressures. For his "Republic of Equals," Serkin decided to have no faculty in the normal sense ("We are all students") and no formal course of instruction. Instead, the 90-odd instrumentalists who attend Marlboro every summer pay $500 apiece for their six-week stay, split up into informal quartets, quintets, or chamber orchestras, depending on what music they want to play. The public concerts are never planned more than a day or two in advance, consist of pieces the resident musicians have chosen by putting their nominations in the suggestion box.

Over the years, many of the big names in music have turned up at Marlboro. Last week all 17 practice rooms were occupied every day. In the new dormitory, Baritone Martial Singher worked on Berlioz' Villanelle with a group of operatic hopefuls. In another cottage, Pianist Claude Frank discussed with Violinist Zvi Zeitlin how to weave the frail melodies of the strings with the fluttering piano passages of Gabriel Faure's Piano Quartet No. 1. Violinist Alexander ("Sasha") Schneider ran through a set of Beethoven sonatas with Artistic Director Serkin's twelve-year-old son, Peter, at the piano. And in the pine-paneled concert hall, Pablo Casals, 83, conducted a chamber orchestra in Mozart's G-Minor Symphony, using a yellow pencil as a baton, spurring on his men and himself with cries of "Oh, very well, very well! So beautiful!"

For all its popularity with musicians, Marlboro winds up in the red every year. Nevertheless, Director Serkin refuses either to make his school more commercial or shift it to a more accessible location.

"If anything," says he, "we will be more selective in the future." Just a Republic of Equals on the hilltop and perhaps a cow or two in the road.

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