Sweet Sounds in the Woods

"If musicians have a special paradise, it will be like this," remarked Japanese Cellist Ko Iwasaki as he gazed around a sunlit meadow. Pianist Rudolf Serkin was in animated conversation with Conductor Eugene Ormandy. Hungary's greatest living composer, Zoltan Kodaly, 82, and his blonde wife Sarolta, 26, were talking over old times with Cellist Pablo Casals, 89, and his dark-haired wife Marta, 24. Under an oak tree Violinists Shmuel Ashkenasi (from Israel) and Charles Avsharian (from the U.S.) were playing a bridge game with Tenor Jon Humphrey (Robert Shaw Chorale soloist) and Horn Player Steve Seiffert (first horn, Buffalo Philharmonic).

This version of heaven was the Marlboro Festival, an event that for 15 years has been attracting an international group of artists to an 18th century ghost town in the shadow of Vermont's Mount Hogback. The festival began when the trustees of tiny (128 students) Marlboro College offered its campus to some of its musical neighbors, most celebrated among them Pianist Rudolf Serkin. In the years since, Serkin has made the festival a center where outstanding soloists, chamber players and orchestral musicians come together for eight summer weeks to work and study in an atmosphere far removed from the usual professional pressures. Many turn down lucrative offers so that they can spend the season at Marlboro playing neglected or unknown works by famous and lesser-known composers. Serkin describes Marlboro as "the accumulation of great talents who inspire each other without competition in a spirit of unselfishness--which is not only rare but idealistic."

Out of Sheds. The musicians live in the students' dormitories, which are either converted farm buildings or handsomely modern wood-and-glass structures, or in nearby cottages. Practice time is unlimited, and practice space is a musician's dormitory room, a laboratory, or one of the sheds scattered through the woods of the old 300-acre farm on which the college was started in 1947. Thus the woods are full of sounds and sweet airs. When players think a work is ready, a decision will be made whether to perform it privately at an informal concert for fellow musicians or for the weekend public--or simply to continue playing it for pleasure.

These professionals live and learn in absolute informality under the guidance of Serkin and, since 1960, Cellist Pablo Casals, who annually makes the trip from Puerto Rico just for the festival. A clapboard barn has been turned into a communal dining room and studio; a second violin might rub elbows with Eugene Ormandy over a dish of veal and boiled potatoes, and everybody takes a turn at doing the waiting chores; last weekend two of the men on duty were Max Rabinovitsj, concertmaster of the St. Louis Symphony, and Mischa Schneider of the Budapest Quartet.

Free & Equal. If the setting is like a boys' prep school mess hall, the talk is still music. And even when participants joke about the master ("There is a man called Roody,/Who never seems too moody"), the remarkable gentleness and modesty of Rudolf Serkin inspires utmost respect and admiration. Said Israeli Cellist Raphael Sommer, who came from Paris just for Marlboro: "It is a great lesson in humility for me to study under such great men as Serkin and Casals. It is an incredible spiritual uplift--like a ray of sunshine from those above us. And to actually play with them--with a man like Serkin! We are free and equal with them. You could not find anything else like this in the world."

While the audiences are relatively small, they come from far and wide. Last week a capacity audience filled the 630-seat auditorium (recently replacing a former cow shed) and flowed into the fields to hear Pablo Casals conduct the Marlboro Orchestra in two programs. The highlight was Johann Sebastian Bach's Suite No. 4 in D Major.

The old man inspired obvious reverence from his colleagues. Two violinists helped him to the podium, where he sank gratefully into his special chair. He conducted sitting down, but sprang upright at moments of crescendo or crisis. His right arm sustained the tempos with wide, sweeping gestures; his left hand energetically swayed from the wrist with a vibrato movement, coaxing sweetness from the orchestra as he does from a cello. The result was a Bach that no one had heard ever before. At concert's end, the Vermont mountains echoed with bravos for the world's greatest cellist, who had proved that he could have become an equally exceptional conductor. Says Casals: "Bach must be conducted with the same passion that a pianist puts into Chopin: after all, Johann Sebastian was a very healthy man who fathered 20 children."

A concert tour of Europe and the Middle East this summer under State Department sponsorship gives Marlboro the privilege of being the first complete festival exported from the U.S. It is an orchestra no commercial organization could afford to keep together for long, in which the first violins, for instance, include Alexander Schneider of the Budapest Quartet, and one of four violists is Soloist Jorge Mester. They are all playing for no wages at all. "They are ready," said Casals proudly. "It is time that America brought culture to the Europeans."

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