Coda
Thursday night was when the real fun started.
I had spent the July Fourth dinner outside, eating at a picnic table with some of the musicians—a French violinist from Lausanne, an American violinist living in Salzburg, an American cellist living in Berlin, a pianist from Italy.
The conversation was mostly non-musical, and ranged from the recent American Supreme Court decisions, to stories of an immigrant childhood in South Carolina, to the anticipation of the outcome of the French elections.
After ice cream, one of the violinists asked, "Do you guys want to go read?" (This after a day of four or five hours of formal rehearsal for most of them.)
They all said yes, one of them shouting across the lawn to invite a violist from Oslo to fill out the quintet. I asked if I could tag along and listen, and they said, "of course!"
We walked across campus, over to one of the newly built rehearsal spaces—an 850 square foot jewel box wrapped in wood, its walls micro-perforated with tens of thousands of nearly invisible holes to help modulate the acoustics, making it perfect for small ensemble playing.
The musicians set up their instruments and music stands and brought out their iPads (a musician can now travel with thousands of downloadable digital scores). Each string player placed a nifty butterfly shaped device at their feet—a blue-tooth pedal mechanism for turning the pages on the iPad 'hands free'.
They played not for rehearsal, not in preparation for an upcoming concert, but to be with one another.
The cellist, who would be entering one of the major European cello competitions in the Fall, shared with us a few movements from Bach's last cello suite, followed by a fiendish encore piece from an Italian composer whose name I forget.
Next came the Faure piano quintet: four movements of modal swells and tides slipping past and under you. Riding the surges, sometimes you couldn't tell where you were, and, like bobbing in the middle of the ocean, it seemed to go on forever in every direction.
And then came the Schumann piano quintet, which bursts out of the gait like a team of horses, and somehow rides well after ice cream.
All in all, it was over two hours of 'unadorned worldly engagement'—informal, keenly expressed, and flowing with wonder and humor.
Afterwords, we all drove through the woods to the nearby lake for an evening swim.
Treading water under a cloudy night sky, our voices skipped across the quicksilver acoustics of the water's surface. In the quieter moments, snippets of conversations from people far across the lake would arrive like phantom telegrams.
The night revealed no stars, only the bracing exhilaration of floating in a cool, dark depth, ears wide open.
—Andrew Gibbons, Marlboro Music 2024
Below: A short documentary about Pablo Cassals at Marlboro