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On an International Scale
Musical Remarks makes profound musical commitment: The five Marks brothers grew up in Loudoun County and, in venues nestled in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains, they came of age musically, athletically and academically. Like their late father, Tom, they have all become Renaissance men, traveling the world and expanding their horizons in many ways and in many places.
Now they want to bring all that they have learned and experienced back to Loudoun by way of a tour they call The Musical Remarks Festival. At the core of the festival is an ensemble comprising David and his brothers, their friends, their spouses and their partners.
The Musical Remarks
David plays the viola. He won the concerto competition at the Indiana University School of Music in 2001, settled in Amsterdam and played with the Radio Philharmonic of Holland. He plays regularly with the Nieuw Ensemble and is a member of the faculty at the DDE_LINK2Apple Hill Chamber Music Festival in New Hampshire. DDE_LINK2 His folk opera "The Odyssey" premiered in 2005 at the Banff Centre in Canada.
Jethro plays the viola and has been associate principal viola of the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Canada since the beginning of the 2003-2004 season. He has performed throughout the United States, Mexico, Europe and Canada. He is first violist of the Zukerman Chamber Players, a chamber ensemble founded by Pinchas Zukerman, an Israeli-Canadian conductor, violinist and violist.
Theo, an accomplished cellist, performed as soloist with the Loudoun Symphony in 1999. He is also a printmaker and violin maker and will be opening his own luthiery workshop in Amsterdam this fall. In 2003, his book, “A Cut Above,” was presented in Utrecht, DDE_LINKThe Netherlands, DDE_LINKin combination with his film and string quartet of the same title.
Vincent also plays the viola and is completing his undergraduate studies at Indiana University.
Paolo plays the cello and has performed works by Russian composer Dmitri Kabalevsky at the Kennedy Center.
Theo’s girlfriend, Dutch violinist Mintje van Lier, has studied with Israeli-German violinist Ilan Gronich and attended the Music School of Indiana University in Bloomington and the Amsterdam Conservatory.
David's wife, Fanny Bray, is a cellist. She was born in Lyon, France, and studied at the Conservatoire National of Lyon, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and the Royal Academy of Music.
Jethro's partner, flautist Emily Smethurst, is a native of Canada and studies with Camille Churchfield, principal flute of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. She has also been part of the National Arts Center in Ottawa.
“We are always going to be playing together, regardless, and we’ll see how it goes this year,” David said. “... If there’s a good public response, it will definitely keep going.”
But the goal, David indicated, is to achieve more than a world-class classical music ensemble. David explained the brothers et al. would like to establish a county institution for artists to meet with other artists of international repute, to have a forum that would allow for a symbiotic exchange of ideas and talent on a global scale.
“The community and the county would really benefit from having some kind of cultural network existing, whether it be in the form of an institution or a festival,” David said.
David said this year, the sole focus is classical, but that the group wants to expand it to include folk musicians as well.
“We would like to see a collaboration, a multidisciplinary, multimedia sort of a local showcase,” David said. “... We want to bring in people we’ve heard about but never been able to meet.”
Lucretia Marks
Lucretia Marks' fate was sealed when, at 26, she came from Holland to Vancouver, Canada, and met her husband, Tom. She was a nurse and a midwife. Tom was a violinist who had started playing the violin when he was “around 11.”
“He was a very humble person who was very well-read,” she said. “The kids and I had a very easy time. We all played tennis. We went across the country in a Winnebago. Music was just another thing we did together.”
Lucretia goes by “Lucky,” pronounced “loo-key.”
Tom, she said, went to Dartmouth and became a speech and language pathologist.
“But music was always his first love,” Lucky said.
Tom was a linguist, speaking French and Spanish.
He was an inventor, a man who made tapes for commuters to enjoy, tapes that contained everything from music to jokes.
“So he was pretty ahead of his time,” Lucky said.
Lucky also described what it was like to get five children up and out of the house every morning.
“Because they had all those other things -- tennis, canoeing,” Lucky said. “There would be a bow tie over here and then where was their music? And often when they left, the house was chaos. But when they left, they all left beautifully.”
Five years ago, Tom was killed in a car accident near their home on Mount Gilead. Lucky said they had all taken a page from Tom's philosophy.
“You can sit with it and be very, very sad, or you can just go on,” Lucky said. “The boys and I have decided to just go on.”
Lucky indicated that much of her husband's spirit lives on in her sons.
“They have the same kind of gentle feeling, of talking to others and listening to them, and they never get angry,” Lucky said. “They just have the beautiful quality of being part of humanity.”
Her sons also have brought a new dynamic into her life.
“I really have five sons and five daughters,” she said.
Contact the writer at ecarlton@timespapers.com
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