Marlboro
One week ago was the end of my second summer at the Marlboro Music School and Festival in Vermont. This festival has been so life-giving, encouraging, affirming and inspiring in the truest sense of these words. Seven weeks in beautiful Vermont, with dozens of generous, fun and soul-sharing individuals making music in creative, sensitive and intelligent ways. It is a little heaven on Earth, even if the cafeteria can’t quite reflect the same sublimity.
Being my second summer, I was blessed not only with a clear idea of how things worked, but also a good bit more responsibility. From day one, I was the captain of a meal clean-up crew for the first week (thanks to my “leadership abilities”). Despite the fact that I had no idea what I was doing, my nickname of “captain” took a few weeks to wear off. After a week as cleaning crew captain, I earned a second badge as the captain of a “scavenger hunt” group, again having no idea what this entailed. I managed to lead a group in performing three small performances including limericks, perhaps the best a cappella version of the beginning of Mozart’s A major Piano Concerto that has ever been heard, a lot of bad singing and a lot of shoes… This evening of skits, scavenged from a list of cryptic guidelines came together in uproarious fun. If anyone could have been called a winner or loser by the judges point system, our group came in third out of three, but we got some laughs and we got to know each other better. There may have been a little stress from the captains quarters, but overall, it was a lot of fun.
There was also music, in case you were wondering. For the second summer in a row, my allergies often bested me, but I was still able to perform in three formal and one informal concert, and one informal run-through.
The first performance was Schumann’s Spanisches Liederspiel with Jonathan Biss and a vocal quartet. I had requested this piece after falling in love with vocal chamber music last summer and discovering it on Spotify in the interim, but I had no idea how interesting the music or the process of putting it all together with Jonathan would be. I learned so much from the way Jonathan worked with us in the treatment of intervals and harmonies in Schumann’s music, and I will never approach Schumann the same way again. It was thrilling to perform the piece and to see the way it progressed and developed for us as an ensemble, even in the performance.
Libby Larsen was a composer in residence this summer and I got to work on “Sifting through the Ruins,” a piece she wrote for mezzo, viola and piano to commemorate the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It was a heavy, but deeply moving piece to work on and perform. From day one, I was blessed with an incredibly sensitive ensemble in Lydia Brown and Will Coleman, as we all put our hearts into the piece to discover it together. When Libby arrived to start working with us on the piece, she invited me to explore colors in my singing that I had never before had the courage to use. This vastly expanded my understanding of the expressive potential my voice has as an instrument. She invited me to dig deeper into my understanding of the complicated emotions surrounding this national tragedy and thus present these emotions to the audience in our performance. I learned a great deal from working both with Libby’s vision for the piece and with such a committed and supportive ensemble in Lydia and Will.
An unexpected gem of the festival was performing Loeffler’s 4 poèmes, also for mezzo, viola and piano, with Sam Rhodes and Ieva Jokubaviciute. I love this piece: the music is wonderful to sing, both beautiful and haunting, as is the spectacular Baudelaire and Verlaine poetry. I didn’t think we would perform it, but when Sam suggested it, I was excited for the possibility of taking the piece to that final stage of preparation. Working with this ensemble of spectacular musicians was once again a deeply special experience and the performance is one that I will not soon forget. I learned to really trust myself as an artist of both music and language as we performed these pieces, and I won’t be making any u-turns from this anytime soon!
Another piece I discovered in my research for this summer’s repertoire requests was Max Reger’s 5 Duette opus 14, with soprano, mezzo and piano. I fell in love with these strange and fascinating duets, with their brilliant counterpoint and unexpected harmonies, and working on them with Lydia and Yvette Keong, my dazzling partner in many-a-crime this summer, was especially meaningful. Both of these artists really committed themselves to these pieces and we pursued them through to the end of our Saturday evening performance. They never lost their intrigue and it was such a pleasure to sink our musical teeth deeply into them.
The final piece I performed was Schumann’s epic song cycle Dichterliebe. This piece was my obsession of the summer and I could not have asked for a better person to explore it with than Filippo Gorini, an extraordinary pianist, musician and friend as committed to discovering this masterpiece as I. The story in both poetry and music was raw and personal for me and I experienced so much emotional processing throughout studying, rehearsing and performing it. I have never worked on a piece quite the way that I did with Filippo, but the two of us fully trusted the other with our own expressive roles as singer and pianist and we found each other in the tempos and colors of each song. I am not sure I can adequately put into words how special this particular collaboration was, but I felt truly honored to have had the opportunity to work with Filippo on this piece. We had the opportunity to present our work to Mitsuko Uchida during the second-to-last week of the festival, and though she had lots of constructive things to tell us, she seemed quite happy with what we were managing to express and this meant a lot to us.
Every performance was punctuated by an onslaught of encouragement and affirmation from the other participants and senior musicians after concerts. These words and hugs I store deeply in my heart for the times when inevitable rejections feel particularly painful. The friendships formed at Marlboro are so special. We all struggled and worked and felt so much together for seven weeks on that campus. We also enjoyed countless meals, silly events, wiffleball games, conversations, parties, excursions off campus and so much more together. We shared and delighted in our diverse cultures and backgrounds and we all loved one another.
Jake, Janice, Nathan, Yvette, Anna, Jungmin, Filippo, Jing, Marlène, Ariel, Leonard, Daniel- and so many others, you made this summer particularly special. Thank you all, whether you read this blog or not :-)
Last summer, I worked the full ten days of postseason, cleaning dorms and campus building after the festival ended. It felt so good to not only give back, but also feel grounded in my roots after such a remarkable summer experience as a performer. This summer, I had the gift of a recital in Maine a week after the festival, but I was able to stay and clean for two days after the participants left campus. This was once again a great experience: a great time to bond with the staff and to release the pressures of being “on” all of the time. I would have loved to have worked more days, but I must admit that Maine has not been bad at all. It is so incredibly beautiful- like Vermont, but by the ocean- and performing with my dear, dear friend and colleague, Mary Castello, was such a treat. The performance on Saturday night was a wonderful reunion of collaboration, but our adventures eating lobster and going for a 4-hour kayak trip on performance day were also unforgettable. I am so thankful for the adventures and friendships that this career path has afforded me even just to this point!
I will be sticking around Maine for the next two weeks, making lobster rolls and scooping ice cream between gigs while I learn music for upcoming projects. I can honestly say, it’s not a bad gig. Indeed, this kind of work is also grounding- hearkening back to high school work at McDonald’s and serving food in the music boosters tent at the country fair- but the views and the space to focus on my other work certainly beat the cornfields of NW Ohio ;-)
Marie on the Road
All performance pictures by Pete Checchia, except the one in Maine- that was taken by Lucy Fitz Gibbon <3
