Recordings from the Marlboro Festival have been made
since 1957 when CBS first took its recording equipment to the Summer
Festival in Vermont. The Busch-Serkin-Moyse institution, founded in
1951, has always been notable for the distinction of the many émigré
musicians associated with it – from the trio of founders, through Casals
– whose orchestral recordings of the 1960s and 70s were so popular –
to Serkin, Végh, Schneider and the many quartets and chamber
groups, established and ad hoc, that have sojourned there. To celebrate
the fiftieth Anniversary Bridge issued this two CD set of performances
given between 1969 (the Schubert with Valente, Wright and Serkin) and
1997 (the two Kurtág works). This, I suppose, embodies a Marlboro
aesthetic, older artists working alongside younger, canonical works
programmed with challenging contemporary repertoire. The booklet manages
to capture some of these decisive virtues with a delicious series of
photographs – Casals, with pipe and black umbrella looking every inch
the Grand Seigneur, the comic duo of Sasha Schneider and Rudolf Serkin,
the former dishevelled and wavy hair untamed, the latter besuited and
owlishly amused, and Sándor Végh conducting the chamber
orchestra, his arms outstretched like some huge force of nature trying
to envelop the universe.
The programme begins with Beethoven’s avuncular Marches
played by Cécile Licad and Mieczysław
Horszowski, the latter four times the former’s age. Youth and experience
conjoin in chamber parity, in a performance full of bite and swing.
The highly experienced Italian violinist Pina Carmirelli leads the performance
of the Verdi Quartet and a fine tonal blend is immediately established
in the opening Allegro. The quartet find a good basic tempo for the
Andantino, relaxing delightfully into the slower section, and take the
Prestissimo movement very quickly but maintaining clarity of articulation
– and displaying collective wit in the tricky pizzicati passage. All
four are on fine form in the imposing fugal finale. Schubert’s Der Hirt
auf dem Felsen is sensitively done, albeit Benita Valente sometimes
forces her voice, and Mendelssohn’s Quartet – in a tape dating from
1995 – has an especially attractive dynamic shaping to it in this performance.
The sense of lofty delicacy engendered in the Presto finale is very
welcome and the reappearance of the expressive Adagio’s material in
the finale is executed with care and with refinement.
The second disc is an all-Hungarian affair, Bartók,
Kurtág and Ligeti. Végh directs a towering performance
of the Divertimento. Bite and drive animate the Allegro first movement,
galvanizing pizzicati surging the musical argument forward. Equally
the reduced terracing of dynamics and the withdrawn intensity of the
central slow movement are palpable and the folk vitality and vivacity
of the finale full of lift and life – the sense of contoured onrush
seismic. The Marlboro Festival Strings shine throughout. Kurtág’s
short, nine-minute Quintet is full of contrasts. In the fourth movement,
a little molto sostenuto, the horn remains implacable whilst oscillatory
frivolity surrounds it and in the Grave a compact mordancy is established
with extraordinary precision (it lasts a mere forty-five seconds). The
Hommage à Mihály András, subtitled 12 Microludes
for String Quartet, is by turns intense, withdrawn and lyrical (the
fifth is of exquisite beauty). By the time we reach the tenth of these
spectrally short pieces (the whole work plays for barely ten minutes)
the writing has become frantically agitated followed immediately by
the blanched reflectiveness of the penultimate Microlude and the quizzical
poetry of the last. To finish the programme there is Ligeti’s First
Quartet, a marvellous and substantial achievement of some twenty-two
minutes’ length. Vivid and frantically motoric this one movement work
(Metamorphoses nocturnes is the sub-title) begins with powerful
instrumental and motivic urgency. Swiftly though it relaxes into becalmed
stasis before renewed power and an air of neo-classicist vigour imparts
that mobility, the effortless spirit of mutability and changeability
that animates the whole work. Around 11.50 a mordant, pizzicato-activated
drunken episode breaks in soon to give way to the keening of the solo
violin over a drone accompaniment. This whole episode is saturated in
nostalgic village memories one feels before the off-beat pizzicati impart
an increasingly whimsical profile to the direction of the music. After
this ceaseless activity and change the cello becomes increasingly ruminative
and all four instruments slowly but inexorably conjoin in a profoundly
interior close, bringing the work to a satisfying intellectual and expressive
end. The quartet of Kim, Cho, Johnson and Palm are highly impressive
here.
An admirable salute then to Marlboro, enshrining some
generous performances, spiced with rigour and prescient intellectual
sinew, all of which one associates, in the very best sense, with the
Vermont festival.
Jonathan Woolf
Beethoven: Cécile Licad and
Mieczysław Horszowski (pianos) 1979 
