Dave Read

By Dave Read, Aug. 16, 2026 performance – It was a homecoming for Marin Alsop to conduct the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in one of their final performances; in 1989, she won the TMC’s Koussevitzky Conducting Medal, which she earned under the tutelage of Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, and Gustav Meier.

After fourteen years as Music Director, in 2021, Ms. Alsop became director laureate of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and in 2025 was awarded the Golden Baton from the League of American Orchestras.

As prelude to Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, Ms. Alsop led the orchestra in a performance of Anna Clyne’s Masquerade, which the composer describes in the program. “Masquerade draws inspiration from the original mid-eighteenth century promenade concerts held in London’s pleasure gardens.” As performed today, the piece was composed to both attract and hold onto the attention of pedestrians, regardless their original destination.

It served as a felicitous segue to Bruch’s concerto, another composition that commands the attention of an audience. Although the violin has been front and center at Tanglewood this season with a roster of all-star soloists, it may have found new heights of brilliance in the hands of Ray Chen, in his Tanglewood debut today.

No better accompaniment to the balance of a summer afternoon than Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, which was given a sublime reading by the Tanglewood fellows today. Comprised of five movements and without a choral element, the piece lends itself to such a valedictory-type performance, as it was also featured in 2023, with Andris Nelsons conducting.

For Tanglewood tickets and other information, please visit the website of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Here is information on how to get to the Berkshires.

By Dave Read, Aug. 9, 2026 performance – As stormy as Saturday was, with thunder and lightning precluding picnics on the lawn and the sprinkle of political posturing over the concert in the Shed, Sunday was an ideal day to arrive early and soak in the naturally soothing atmosphere produced by Tanglewood when the podium is commanded by artists, not managers and marketers.

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For Tanglewood tickets and other information, please visit the website of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Here is information on how to get to the Berkshires.

By Dave Read, Aug. 4, 2026 performance – A miscellany of music and talk was on the bill tonight in a program called We, the People, an American Journey at Tanglewood. In addition to the Boston Symphony Orchestra, on stage in the Koussevitzky Music Shed were conductors Teddy Abrams and Ken-David Masur, musicians and speakers Yo-Yo Ma, Aoife O’Donovan, Jennifer Kreisberg, James Taylor, Jon Batiste, Heather Cox Richardson, and Bryan Stevenson.

Whereas a typical Tanglewood concert includes the work of one, two, or three composers, the music tonight is the work of thirteen musicians; E pluribus unum to the max! Fittingly, Tanglewood Music Center founding father Aaron Copland had two compositions on the bill, the opening Fanfare for the Common Man and the closing fanfare from his Symphony No. 3.

In between were compositions by “music warrior for Native equity and parity,” Brent Michael David, Stephan Foster, Antonin Dvorak, Copland protege Leonard Bernstien, John Knowles Paine, and Julia Wolfe. Diana Wyenn was director and dramaturg, which Mr. Webster tells us is a specialist in the art or technique of dramatic composition and theatrical representation.

For Tanglewood tickets and other information, please visit the website of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Here is information on how to get to the Berkshires.

By Dave Read, Aug. 4, 2026 performance – A subsequent committment prevented us from attending the gala concert this evening, so the scope of this report is limited to a stroll amid the many musical performances provided by the Boston Symphony Orchestra during the afternoon of Tanglewood on Parade, which is at the center of the BSO’s annual local fund-raising efforts.

Following a week or so of less-than-ideal weather, August 4th was as glorious a summer day in the Berkshires as could reasonably be hoped for. Within a span of less than an hour, and withing a radius of a thousand yards, there was a Tanglewood Music Center piano recital in Ozawa Hall, an audience sing-along with TMC vocal fellow in Studio E of the Linde Center, a Boston University Tanglewood Institute chorus and orchestra concert in the Koussevitzky Music Shed, and a veritable hoedown with BSO violinist Bonnie Berwick and Friends on the Tappan House porch!

For Tanglewood tickets and other information, please visit the website of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Here is information on how to get to the Berkshires.

By Dave Read, Aug. 2, 2026 performance – The Tanglewood audience was treated last weekend to two rising stars in the constellation of violin soloists, Augustan Hadelich and Himari; center stage today belonged to virtuoso Joshua Bell, who has been the delight of Tanglewood audiences since 1989.

This was a repeat of Bell’s 2011 performance of the Fantasia on Scottish folk melodies for violin by Max Bruch. It’s no wonder a musician of Bell’s stature would enjoy performing a composition that puts the full gamut of his skill and artistry on display. Also featuring on the piece was the playing of the Boston Symphony’s principal harpist, Jessica Zhou.

For an encore, the audience was treated to Mr. Bell’s improvisation on Souvenirs d’Amerique, by Henri Vieuxtemps.

Following intermission, Maestro Nelsons led the orchestra in Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 3 in B flat. Along with an introductory piece called Mamoris by Sarah Kirkland Snider, a thoroughly satisfying afternoon of musical excellence emanate from the Koussevitzky Music Shed on the stately yet bucolic campus in the Berkshires.

For Tanglewood tickets and other information, please visit the website of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Here is information on how to get to the Berkshires.

By Dave Read, Aug. 1, 2026 performance – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, sung in Italian by an amazing array of vocalists, accompanied by the brilliance of the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the baton of their beloved music director, Andris Nelsons, amounted to as grand an evening’s entertainment as could be had anywhere, anytime.

It just doesn’t get any better than this. There is no handmade or machine-made instrument or device equal to a well-trained human voice, nor is there any ensemble more dynamic and beautiful than a well-trained orchestra when conducted by a well-trained and experienced conductor. That’s what we had at in the Koussevitzky Music Shed at Tanglewood tonight, a three hour performance that nobody hoped would end a second earlier than it had to.

Although himself an original artist of the first order, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro is based on a contemporary French play, The Barber of Seville, which, decades later, would be transformed into an opera of the same name by Gioachino Rossini. As a Spanish barber imagined into existence by a French playwright, then transposed into libretti by two Italian writers and made the nuclei of Austrian and Italian operas, Figaro must be the avatar of European unity!

That is how fine art and culture works. Since there is nothing new under the sun, the fine arts are a constant flow of human expression continually refreshed and renewed down the generations. The most artists can do to reflect and improve upon whatever of life and art and they have experienced.

(That process of art and musical regurgitation was called the Folk Method when Bob Dylan began his career in Greenwich Village, breathing new life into old sea shanties, Negro spirituals, Celtic ballads, and whatever he heard at the Grand Ole Opry or on the radio.)

Even though The Marriage of Figaro is among the all-time most popular operas and the Boston Symphony Orchestra has been catering to public tastes since 1881, tonight is the first time the BSO has performed the complete opera.

I don’t know if Chad Smith is consulting anybody on how to sell-out the Shed eight weeks every summer, but I promise you that everybody in the audience tonight is a volunteer BSO booster, unless the suits keep screwing things up. Had Mozart showed up to take a bow tonight, I bet he would’ve worn a rose boutonniere.

If there was any element or aspect of tonight’s performance that stood out from all the others it would be a few soprano and or mezzo-soprano duets; stirring as each solo voice sounded, pairs of them can be other-worldly!

For a report on tonight’s concert from the perspective of a scholar, please see: Mozart’s Transformative Take on Power and Forgiveness, at The Boston Music Intelligencer.

Hanna-Elisabeth Müller, soprano (Countess)
Nikola Hillebrand, soprano (Susanna)
Eden Bartholomew, soprano (Barbarina)
Emily D’Angelo, mezzo-soprano (Cherubino)
Elizabeth Bishop, mezzo-soprano (Marcellina)
Joshua Sanders, tenor (Don Curzio)
Rodell Rosel, tenor (Don Basilio)
Joshua Hopkins, baritone (Count)
Michael Sumuel, baritone (Figaro)
Patrick Carfizzi, baritone (Doctor Bartolo)
Dean Murphy, baritone (Antonio)
Tanglewood Music Center Vocal Fellow James Darrah Black, director