A Magic Moment at Marlboro
Music has always been a cause for celebration in the Salter family. Whether for birthdays, reunions or while bicycling down country roads, gather two or more Salters together and they just might break into a repertoire of familiar family songs that have been passed down through the generations.
In August 1995, Kit and I traveled to western Massachusetts to visit his sister Jean and her husband Jurgen over his birthday weekend. Our drive from the airport in Connecticut to Amherst, Massachusetts was a trip back in time. Stretches of the route are still covered by surprisingly dense expanses of woodlands broken up by the small farms and old townships that lie beyond this sequestered corridor of interstate highway. Names link towns with 17th century British settlements and earlier Indian nations that preceded them.
Western Massachusetts has some of the richest farmland in New England. Towns two and three centuries old—Hadley, Whatley, Deerfield, and Amherst where Emily Dickinson lived—are still bordered by small farms and wooden tobacco barns next to fields planted in sweet corn and potatoes. It’s a landscape perfect for a bucolic bicycle outing.
Saturday morning the four of us donned helmets and followed Jurgen's lead, cycling in tandum through the center of Amherst to the Norwotauk Rail Trail. On this narrow, blacktopped trail—once a narrow- gauge rail bed—our merry quartet cycled past dairy cows and tobacco fields, looked into backyards, intersected Hadley's tree-lined main street, and crossed a railroad bridge over the Connecticut River just as trains from another earlier era had done countless times.
Cycling in a light rain, we shared the shady pathway lined with ferns, wild raspberries, and queen Anne's lace with only a few other cyclists, and broke into a jolly rendition of “Singin’ in the Rain.” Our only stop off the trail was lunch at Pete's burger stand. Pete's famous "2 burgers for a buck" and foot-long hot dogs on a bun of toasted bread, served with an order of onion rings, fueled our peddling those final few miles back home. That afternoon we drove along winding mountain roads to Vermont's Marlboro College where their summer music festival was underway.
Nested amongst fields of grazing sheep and comprised of only a few simple white framed buildings, the college has been the summer home of the Marlboro Music Festival for 75 years.It was then that the noted violinist Adolf Busch envisioned a summer community of musicians. They would be of all ages, backgrounds, and nationalities and would be in an environment that allowed them to rehearse and perform without the pressures of ordinary concert life. With the help of his brother Herman and his son-in-law Rudolf Serkin, he founded the Marlboro Music School and annual summer festival.
Since its first summer in 1951, when musicians rehearsed and performed in the converted barns and farm buildings of Marlboro College, musicians from around the world have participated in the festival. Master musicians and talented students spend hours sharing their craft and love of music in rehearsals of their own length and design. On six weekends from July to mid-August, the musicians perform selected pieces in benefit concerts that attract chamber music lovers from around New England and beyond.
Saturday’s evening concert was an intellectually challenging program that moved from the more familiar Trio in G Major, Opus 9, No 1 by Beethoven to an obscure work by Emmanuel Chabrier, and an early modern piece by Arnold Schoenberg. In this intimate setting where the orchestra might consist of as few as 3 musicians, there was a sense that music first performed more than a century ago was being heard again, for the first time.
What I’ve never forgotten was Sunday's afternoon program that began darkly with atonal works by Max Reger and Maurice Ravel, neither piece much to our liking. Then Brahm's Trio in B Major, Opus 8 for piano, violin, and cello followed the intermission. The cellist was a young student named Sophie Shao.
As the piece began, Ms. Shao wrapped her bare arms around her cello and the two became one. With her eyes closed, she extended the slender arm that held her bow and brought it back with a downward bend of the elbow. As the motion was repeated allegro con brio, Sophie was transformed into a swan. Finally, like the ballerina in Swan Lake, she folded her wings, encircling the cello until the final note fluttered through the air, touching the audience with the lightness of a feather.
In this quiet place in the Green Mountains of Vermont, cellist Sophie Shao beautifully recreated the music of an eighteenth-century European composer. Thirty years later, the memory of that moment is still pure magic.
[Biography: Sophie Shao is the child of immigrants from Taiwan. A native of Houston, TX, she began playing the cello at the age of six. At the age of 13, she enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and went on to receive her MM from the Yale School of Music. She has been on the faculty of Vassar College, Princeton University, and Bard Conservatory. Today she is a dedicated music educator who performs around the world. She plays on an Honoré Derazey cello ca. 1855, formerly owned by Pablo Casals.] www.sophieshao.com