2026

By Dave Read, June 30, 2026 performance – If classical music resides within impermeable bounds, pop music lives inside a porous membrane that allows for one genre to blend with another, so that an audience may enjoy musical mulligatawny. Who knows where, why, or how such marriages are made, but the middle-of-the -road Boston Pops Orchestra now regularly shares the stage with the far-from-mainstream music of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead.

Not a few audience members danced in their seats, since heightened vigilance makes the aisles no-dance zones, inconceivable when America was run as a republic, by the people. The Shed was full and the late afternoon rain seemingly had no deleterious effect on the crowded law.

Even though I left my critical glasses home in favor of my summertime shades, I’m reminded of what Neil Young said to the acoustic engineer who was adjusting the balance on the massive speakers installed on his porch and open barn: “more barn!” I think added prominence to the orchestra would have enhanced tonight’s concert, which was plenty fun even so, even if dancers at their seats make better doors than windows!

By Dave Read, June 26, 2026 performance – Two weeks before the downbeat of the first Boston Symphony Orchestra program of the 2026 season at Tanglewood, 1979 Tanglewood fellow Wynton Marsalis led the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra through a program in the Koussevitzky Music Shed.

The concert was excellent as expected, but surprisingly brief, ending 65 minutes after it began. Maestro Marsalis introduced the concluding number just as a response to the show was beginning to unfold in my mind.

In retrospect, the program felt more like introductory recital than a concert. Each number flowed to its own end, with titles and solos called out, which made it feel serial, adding up to a sum, but not an organic whole, as jazz concerts do. Perhaps this show reflects the state of jazz, in the aftermath of a brighter time, when jazz was available all day long somewhere on FM radio, announced by well-informed deejays, who would also tell of dozens of gigs upcoming throughout the region.

Every part of every tune played tonight sounded as full and bright as could be, yet we expected something more. Earlier performances by Mr. Marsalis, leading various bands and combos, have always left us wanting more.

By Dave Read, June 21, 2026 performance – Tanglewood’s beautiful and versatile Ozawa Hall proved a fair haven for devotees of Yacht Rock, an unabashed nostalgia for a time not long ago, but which now feels like an ancient age.

My pop music memory reaches all the way to a time when church and civic halls hosted weekend dances for high school kids, with local bands blasting out covers of the latest hits heard over and over on the radio and American Bandstand. With such quaint things as free radio and TV relics of the ancient age, the Yacht Rock revue carries delicious youthfulness to patrons long since gone from high school.

Whereas the bands at my teenage dances had scant time to hone their chops and learn the new hit songs, the musicians who comprise the nearly twenty year old Yacht Rock Revue have their sets down pat and transition with seamless ease through ABBA, Steely Dan, Hall & Oates, Toto, Jackson Browne, Fleetwood Mac, and dozens more. And instead of sporting letter sweaters, the varsity in attendance today wore captain’s hats!