Part of the Listen to This Audio Guide
I visited Marlboro Music, Rudolf Serkin’s fabled chamber-music retreat in Vermont, three times in the summer of 2008, and wrote about the experience for The New Yorker the following year. Above and below are pictures of the Marlboro grounds — formerly a dairy farm, currently a small liberal-arts college:
The coffee shop, hub of social activity (pp. 246-48):
Rudolf Serkin and Adolf Busch, Marlboro’s co-founders (pp. 250-52), perform the Andante moderato from Schubert’s Fantasy in C:
Recorded in Small Queen’s Hall, London, May 6, 1931. From the set Franz Schubert: Chamber Music, on the greatly missed Andante label.
Serkin plays the first movement of Beethoven’s Sonata Opus 111:
Haydn in the dining hall :
The infamous scheduling board — all these rehearsals took place on a single weekend:
Mitsuko Uchida, Soovin Kim, and David Soyer perform the Andante of Schubert’s Piano Trio in E-flat (pp. 257-58):
Recorded live at Marlboro on July 13, 2008. By kind permission of the artists and Marlboro Music.
David Soyer’s music stand inspired an epic prank (p. 260):
Another prank: someone photoshopped Uchida’s Peggy Guggenheim sunglasses onto pictures of everyone on campus:
Uchida practices the Choral Fantasy in the concert hall (pp. 262-63)
The cemetery in Guilford where Serkin and Busch are buried (p. 264):
Serkin’s grave is marked by the first flat stone on the left; Busch is to the right, beneath the bush:
