Marlboro Marks 50 Years of Music, Mixing, Mischief

It was lunchtime at the Marlboro chamber music festival, which meant time for a napkin fight.

In the white clapboard house where famed artists have played music with younger colleagues each summer for 50 years, the crumpled wads of paper struck some of the world’s finest musical heads.

“I don’t throw napkins--but if I’m hit, I take revenge,” joked concert pianist Mitsuko Uchida, the festival’s artistic co-director, as she was pelted by a ball sailing from another table.

The elite music festival is celebrating its half-century anniversary with concerts this month in Philadelphia, Washington, New York and Boston, featuring more than 50 Marlboro artists.

To attend the seven-week festival, musicians go through competitive auditions. At Marlboro, they rehearse all day and perform concerts. They are paid only expenses, taking part for love of their art.

And for the networking. Some big names have honed their skills here in the verdant hills, where peacocks stroll among the white cottages of Marlboro College. Among the alumni are cellist Yo-Yo Ma, pianist Van Cliburn and--as a chubby 15-year-old--James Levine, now chief conductor of New York’s Metropolitan Opera.

Marlboro actually began modestly--in a converted cow barn.

The late pianist Rudolf Serkin started spending summers here in the late 1940s because it reminded him of his native Austria, which he had fled. He rented a house up a dirt road from the Robb family farm.

“When I was 12, Rudi came to the house and heard me play,” said Thomas Robb, 70, a pianist and retired public-school music director in Westchester County, New York.

Serkin invited musician friends from New York and Philadelphia up to Vermont and “in a chicken house, here were world-class artists playing,” said Robb.

(Serkin and his young daughter, Judith, started the napkin-fighting tradition.)

Marlboro’s first gathering was what Serkin called a “musical kibbutz” of immigrants from war-torn Europe playing with younger proteges. By 1950, they had found their rustic concert hall: a one-time barn that now also serves as the dining hall of Marlboro College, a cluster of cottages on a hill with 300 students.

High points in the festival’s history include recordings of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos made in “the barn” and conducted by famed cellist Pablo Casals, who visited in the 1960s and returned for 13 summers.

“The quality was so transcendental, it was overwhelming,” said Robb.

Another Marlboro legacy: Romances begun here have led to at least 45 marriages, said festival administrator Frank Salomon, a New York concert manager.

With an endowment of more than $25 million, Marlboro has an annual $2 million budget. Yet it continues to be run in a down-to-earth way--with often sublime results. A sign on the narrow road leading to the site reads: “Caution, musicians at play.”

The more than 70 musicians each summer are considered neither students nor teachers, just “participants.” About a third are “seniors,” veterans who have come to Marlboro for years.

Each Sunday morning, color-coded cards are tacked up on a board listing the week’s more than 220 rehearsals.

“Everyone gets something juicy to work on,” said Greg Raden, principal clarinetist of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.