[{"document_url": "http://www.classical.net/news/festivals-concerts/2009/06/", "unformatted_src": "http://www.classical.net/music/images/css_img/classnet-big.jpg", "src": "http://www.classical.net/music/images/css_img/classnet-big.jpg", "formatted_filename": "classnet big", "alt_text": "Classical Net"}, null, null, null, {"document_url": "http://www.classical.net/news/festivals-concerts/2009/06/", "unformatted_src": "http://www.classical.net/music/images/amazon/amazon_lg.jpg", "src": "http://www.classical.net/music/images/amazon/amazon_lg.jpg", "formatted_filename": "amazon lg", "alt_text": "Amazon"}, {"document_url": "http://www.classical.net/news/festivals-concerts/2009/06/", "unformatted_src": "http://www.classical.net/music/images/amazonuk/amazonuk_lg.jpg", "src": "http://www.classical.net/music/images/amazonuk/amazonuk_lg.jpg", "formatted_filename": "amazonuk lg", "alt_text": "Amazon UK"}, {"document_url": "http://www.classical.net/news/festivals-concerts/2009/06/", "unformatted_src": "http://www.classical.net/music/images/amazonde/amazonde_lg.jpg", "src": "http://www.classical.net/music/images/amazonde/amazonde_lg.jpg", "formatted_filename": "amazonde lg", "alt_text": "Amazon Germany"}, {"document_url": "http://www.classical.net/news/festivals-concerts/2009/06/", "unformatted_src": "http://www.classical.net/music/images/amazonca/amazonca_lg.jpg", "src": "http://www.classical.net/music/images/amazonca/amazonca_lg.jpg", "formatted_filename": "amazonca lg", "alt_text": "Amazon Canada"}, {"document_url": "http://www.classical.net/news/festivals-concerts/2009/06/", "unformatted_src": "http://www.classical.net/music/images/amazonfr/amazonfr_lg.jpg", "src": "http://www.classical.net/music/images/amazonfr/amazonfr_lg.jpg", "formatted_filename": "amazonfr lg", "alt_text": "Amazon France"}, {"document_url": "http://www.classical.net/news/festivals-concerts/2009/06/", "unformatted_src": "http://www.classical.net/music/images/amazonjp/amazonjp_lg.jpg", "src": "http://www.classical.net/music/images/amazonjp/amazonjp_lg.jpg", "formatted_filename": "amazonjp lg", "alt_text": "Amazon Japan"}, {"document_url": "http://www.classical.net/news/festivals-concerts/2009/06/", "unformatted_src": "http://www.classical.net/music/images/arkivmusic/general.jpg", "src": "http://www.classical.net/music/images/arkivmusic/general.jpg", "formatted_filename": "general", "alt_text": "ArkivMusic"}, {"document_url": "http://www.classical.net/news/festivals-concerts/2009/06/", "unformatted_src": "http://www.classical.net/music/images/arkivmusic/arkiv_2013.jpg", "src": "http://www.classical.net/music/images/arkivmusic/arkiv_2013.jpg", "formatted_filename": "arkiv", "alt_text": "ArkivMusic"}, null, {"document_url": "http://www.classical.net/news/festivals-concerts/2009/06/", "unformatted_src": "http://www.classical.net/music/images/news/mitsukouchida.jpg", "src": "http://www.classical.net/music/images/news/mitsukouchida.jpg", "formatted_filename": "mitsukouchida"}, null, null, {"document_url": "http://www.classical.net/news/festivals-concerts/2009/06/", "unformatted_src": "http://www.classical.net/music/images/trumpet.jpg", "src": "http://www.classical.net/music/images/trumpet.jpg", "formatted_filename": "trumpet", "alt_text": "Trumpet", "rendered_width": 120, "rendered_height": 41}, null]
The Internet's Premier Classical Music Source

 Site News

What's New for
Last Quarter 2017?

 
Festivals & Concerts: June 2009 Archives

Marlboro Festival 2009

June 22, 2009 9:15 AM | Permalink The Music Mountain

The classical world's most coveted retreat

By Alex Ross Mitsuko Uchida, one of the world's leading classical pianists, could comfortably pass her summers flying from one festival to another, staying in luxury hotels and private villas. Instead, she stays on the campus of Marlboro College, a small liberal-arts institution in southern Vermont. Since 1951, the college has hosted Marlboro Music, an outwardly low-key summer gathering that functions variously as a chamber-music festival, a sort of finishing school for gifted young performers, and a clandestine summit for the musical intelligentsia. Uchida and the pianist Richard Goode serve as Marlboro's co-directors, alternating the lead role from year to year; last summer, when I visited three times, Uchida was in residence from late June until early August. She plays a variety of roles in the Marlboro world – high priest, den mother, provocateur, jester, and arbiter of style.

Marlboro, whose fifty-ninth session gets under way next week, is a singular phenomenon. The great Austrian-born pianist Rudolf Serkin, Marlboro's co-founder and longtime leader, once declared that he wished to "create a community, almost utopian," where artists could forget about commerce and escape into a purely musical realm. Marlboro has been compared to a kibbutz, a hippie commune, Shangri-La, a cult (but "a good cult"), Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, and George Orwell's Animal Farm, where "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." On certain lazy days, it becomes a highbrow summer camp, where brainy musicians go swimming in the local pond.

Read more about this at the New Yorker website (subscription and registration required):


« Festivals & Concerts: April 2009 | Main Index | Archives Home | News | Contacts | Copyright