Each summer at Marlboro Music, musicians collaborate and explore chamber music repertoire, only a portion of which is performed in concert. Concert repertoire is announced a week or so in advance, and often, most seats have already been sold. In this way, attending a performance is less about hearing a specific work than experiencing the fruits of the labor of Marlboro’s first-rate artists.
On Saturday, Marlboro musicians performed Felix Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio in D Minor, Op. 49. The program note was short.
“The piano trio came a long way from the time that it was championed by Haydn, who wrote 45 of them, to the time when it was further expanded by Beethoven, whose ever-evolving trio output exemplified the stages of his artistic growth at large. Mendelssohn only wrote two piano trios, but this one, his first, is one of his most beloved chamber works of any genre. Pablo Casals selected the piece for his performance at the White House at the invitation of President John F. Kennedy alongside longtime Marlboro participants Mieczysław Horszowski and Alexander Schneider in 1961. The trio begins with a searching theme that quickly becomes impassioned and sets the tone for a masterwork that has no shortage of lyricism, but which nevertheless moves actively from its animated beginning to a flowing second movement, a playful scherzo, and a fervent and unforgettably tuneful finale.”
Fewer than 150 words across four sentences: one sentence about the genre, one about the composer’s work in the genre, one about the features of this specific work, and sandwiched in the middle, one sentence about … Spanish cellist Pablo Casals?
Casals was, as it turns out, an institution at Marlboro. Attending in the 1960s and early ‘70s, he described it as a temple of music. The summer residency rejuvenated him in the final chapter of his (very long) life. His recruitment of Marlboro colleagues Mieczysław Horszowski and Alexander Schneider for the 1961 White House recital hint at Marlboro’s broader influence on his artistic activity during this period.
Beyond the essentials, the strongest program notes enhance a reader’s experience with the music they’ll hear in performance. This note in particular encourages you to feel as though you’re a part of something more significant than a reading of Mendelssohn in pastoral Vermont: you’re glimpsing a tradition and community of music that extends to the heart of the 20th century and the heights of cultural events and political influence in America.
Leave a Reply