2022

By Dave Read (Sept. 3, 2022 concert) – On what the Irish call a “soft day,” Van Morrison drew a massive crowd to Tanglewood, where he and his band laid down as thoroughly satisfying a 90+/- minute set as we’ve heard, lately.

Morrison, a veritable one-man band himself, was accompanied by brass, guitars, bass, drums, percussion, keyboards and backing vocals. Each section and musician had opportunities in the limelight and each took full advantage. One highlight was You’re Driving Me Crazy, the title song from a recent album Morrison made with Joey DeFrancesca, who died last month. Master of the Hammond B3 organ, DeFrancesca performed in an “Organ Summit” with Jimmy McGriff at the 2002 Tanglewood Jazz Festival.

James Hunter played a brief opening set, then joined Van’s band for a few numbers, including a little harmonica duet with the boss, who also took a few turns on sax and sang Baby Please Don’t Go through his harp! The show ended with the double-whammy of Brown Eyed Girl and Gloria – it was a riot of a sing-and-sway-along. The headliner bid us thanks and farewell about midway through the double coda, and could’ve been on the MassPike by the time his band quit.

Shut up and sing!

Never has magnanimity been my strong suit, but I gave it a try when I decided to convert a stash of overripe tomatoes into salsa, instead of follow through on my notion to launch an heirloom critique of Van Morrison’s pandemic tantrum.

If it is preposterous for stars across the pop culture spectrum to presume their box office appeal renders their politics relevant, neither ought their craft be dismissed because their attractiveness is limited to their talent, and doesn’t include their reasoning skills.

By Dave Read (Sept. 3, 2022 concert) – Every octogenarian willing and able to draw an audience in these penny-pinching days deserves a standing ovation, and Judy Collins got one tonight. Many of her audience seem in the throes of nostalgia – eager to feel the way they felt when she drew Suite: Judy Blue Eyes out of Steven Stills, with whom she performed here in 2018.

My Judy Collins nostalgia is more prosaic, however. At the tail end of the 1960’s, I delivered a bottle of Almaden chablis to her dressing room at Symphony Hall, home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The term was up at B.U. and, between semesters, I worked at a package store near Massachusetts Ave., where the concert hall is.

The event lodged in memory because the bottle looked cool, I had never heard of Almaden, and Judy Collins was right up there with Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, Gladys Knight, Joni Mitchell, Aretha Franklin, Mama Cass, Grace Slick…all the chick singers I dug!

Tonight’s concert reminded me of how we were delivered pop music back in the day. A 3 minute song gets played on the radio, then the DJ talks, plays an advertisement, another song, DJ talks, song, news, weather, sports headlines, song, DJ…

Bill Graham’s Fillmore at Tanglewood

Our reward, then, for having to listen to four parts malarkey for every part good rock ‘n roll, was that we got to see and hear our contemporary heroes at venues such as Tanglewood, when the BSO had the good sense to put the Popular Artist franchise in the hands of that other great Wolfgang – Bill Graham!

By Dave Read (Sept. 3, 2022 concert) – It is a great treat to witness the elasticity of the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood. A mere six days after it proved the ideal venue for a performance of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9, by two hundred +/- members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Tanglewood Festival Chorus, a lone man with guitar and voice fills the same space with music of equivalent brilliance.

Richard Thompson is a guitar virtuoso and songwriter from England who co-founded a great band, Fairport Convention, in 1967, a time when great bands had scant life expectancy (Electric Flag, Cream, Blind Faith, Moby Grape, The Fugs, Ultimate Spinach…). He left the band in 1970, had great success in a duet with his wife Linda for a decade or so, and has been a revered solo practitioner ever since. (The brand Fairport Convention continues, but not as a great band.)

Revealed in Thompson’s abbreviated set, is a man who has seen, felt, and imagined things he needs to sing about, with a rich voice that blends seamlessly with the brilliance of his guitar work.

It is mystifying how an artist, at this stage of a remarkable career, is billed as an opening act, and it would be unkind to suggest that the headliner may need the box office boost Thompson provides.

By Dave Read (August 28, 2022 concert) – The Tanglewood portion of the Boston Symphony Orchestra‘s 141st season concluded with a brilliant performance of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9 in D minor, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas.

Beethoven’s great work has been on the season-closing program at Tanglewood for a quarter century; thus, a returning audience has the opportunity to enjoy it to the fullest, because there is almost always a guest conductor on the podium. (BSO music directors depart for gigs overseas three or four weeks into summer) No less an eminence than Mstislav Rostropovich both conducted and played cello in 1998, when I first attended.

Maestro Thomas arrived at the Tanglewood Music Center as a conducting student in 1968, became the orchestra’s assistant conductor for a year, and then associate conductor until 1973, when Seiji Ozawa began his long reign atop the BSO. In 1987, Thomas established the New World Symphony, regarded as a replication of the Tanglewood Music Center.

Today’s program opened with Psalm 90, by Charles Ives, the choral piece he considered his valedictory work. And so a series of organ chords are the first sounds of a Tanglewood program, an event as rare as hen’s teeth!

And the Tanglewood Festival Chorus gets into the act long before they would have otherwise. Their still, soundless, seated presence above and behind the orchestra during the first forty-five minutes of the Ninth, is a visible sacrifice to art.

When it wills, nature adorns itself most felicitously – every harshness met with a subtlety, roars answered with whispers, searing crescendos come to rest on beds of rhythm. Buffeted, at the dawn of the nineteenth century, by the madness of old world politics, Beethoven found balance with a pilgrimage into music, into the organization of sound, that element of nature that inspires the liberation of the spirit, and rails against its regimentation.

Few items across the world of art are so universally regarded as epitomes as is Beethoven’s Ninth, nor are many artists as beloved as he is. The tiny bit of time spent in rapt attention can be as wise and beneficial a purchase as any other made that season.

Instead of more words about a thing that is to be heard, received, felt – rather than described, here is a look at my program, with simultaneous notes meant to remind me what to write about. But, despite the look of frenzy, never have I felt more calm and peaceful at a concert – or anywhere.

If brain cancer renders this performance Michael Tilson Thomas’ valediction, then may it be revealed that Beethoven himself was in the wings, to spur the musicians on to the performance of their lives.

By Dave Read (August 21, 2022 concert) – The Violin Concerto No. 1, in G minor, Opus 26, composed by Max Bruch in 1866, was given a tearfully beautiful performance by Itzhak Perlman at Tanglewood, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the artful direction of Dima Slobodeniouk.

Thus, we have the work of a German, played by a Jew, with tempo set by a Russian – thus, we understand the epitaph on Bruck’s tombstone:

“Music is the Language of God.”

(Politics, then, must be the Babel of Humanity)

Mr. Perlman, born in 1945 in British Palestine, first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1958, then shared the bill on the same show seven years later with the Rolling Stones! He is the first virtuoso I heard in person, several decades ago, when he played the Violin Concerto in D Minor of Jean Sibelius, with the Springfield Symphony. Such is the thrill of great music when performed by a great musician – it is everlasting.

What a fascination it is to see what you see at such a concert, all the equipment, and furniture, and people in similar costumes (most masked today), and all the implements, the instruments, all the beating, blowing, and bowing the score calls for, cohere into a thing the ear tells the tongue to say is pure and rich as honey.

After a fist-bump with the first violin, Mr. Perlman left the stage to waves of applause from the audience, on their feet in the Shed and across the vast lawn, where another blissful Sunday afternoon was enjoyed.

Then, Maestro Slobodeniouk led his charges through a thrilling reading of the Brahms Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Opus 68 to conclude the program, which had begun with a brief entertainment named subito con forza (suddenly with force) by the young Korean composer, Unsuk Chin.

Although it may be a case of anticipatory hearing, I’m sure I heard Beethoven several times during the BSO’s performance of Brahms. With Beethoven’s Ninth on the bill here next week, is it any wonder?