Tanglewood concert reviews

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 13, 2023 performance – Berkshire county’s favorite adopted son and one of the world’s most popular musicians, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, was substituted because of Covid on today’s program by the beloved soprano and frequent Tanglewood guest artist, Renée Fleming. That today’s program was put together virtually overnight is testament to the devoted professionalism of all involved, but especially Ms. Fleming and Maestro Nelson, who combined to flood the Koussevitsky Music Shed and lawn with the sounds of beautiful music.

Resplendent in jewels and a gown of spring green hues, Ms. Fleming appears intent to satisfy our vision as much as her singing will reward our listening. But, this is an instance where costume is a mere courtesy; from the instant we hear her voice, the visual plane becomes utterly irrelevant.

Irrelevant also is whether the audience understands German or has any clue about what the poems mean, for which Richard Strauss composed such gorgeous settings. Nontheless, electronic supertitles crawl thirty feet over the heads of the orchestra, for anybody who wishes to ground the soaring sounds made by Ms. Fleming in literal sense!

When set to music and sung, words transition into being vehicles for the conveyance of sound rather than of sense, as they are in print; their literal meaning becomes subordinate to the sounds produced by their singers.

After intermission, Maestro Nelsons led the orchestra in a lively reading of the 1947 version of Petrushka, the ballet composed by Igor Stravinsky in 1911 for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The orchestra opened the program with a reprise of a piece premiered here last year, Julia Adolphe’s Makeshift Castle.

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 6, 2023 performance – The most important and the most difficult part of reporting on concerts is to get the temple within ready to receive the music about to be produced in the temple without – at Tanglewood, it’s the Shed, consecrated to the memory of Serge Koussevitsky.

My last errant thought before today’s concert was, “We can land a man on the moon, but we can’t make a double piano?” One of these days, I’ll do a little research, just to see how close some fellow daydreamer has come to designing such an instrument.

Who knows if such an idea has ever occurred to the Dutch brothers Lucas and Arthur Jussen, who performed the Mendelssohn Concerto in E for two pianos and orchestra, on a pair of shiny black pianos that looked like a single object.

As much as the brothers may resemble one another at rest, today’s aural delight was augmented by the visual of them playing – one with his head tilted back in as if in ecstasy, the other bowed over the keyboard with vehemence, then vice versa as dictated by Mendelsshon’s score.

Some extra measure of genius must’ve been employed by the composer to create something like a duet within a duet. To my non-expert mind, a concerto is a duet between some instrument and the orchestra. With two instruments, although united in their conversation with the orchestra, they do not echo one another, but must converse so well with one another, that the orchestra – and the audience, hears the single voice.

And so the genius of the composition become measure after measure of gorgeous sound thanks to the artistry of the Jussen brothers and the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the expert baton of toady’s guest conductor, in his Tanglewood debut, Kazuki Yamada. Maestro Yamada is about to become chief conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

After intermission, audience was treated to Symphonie fantastique, Episode from the life of an artist, Opus 14, by Hector Berlioz. It seemed a perfect selection for a perfect summer afternoon in the Berkshires.

Kazuki Yamada, conductor
Lucas and Arthur Jussen, pianos

MENDELSSOHN Concerto in E for two pianos and orchestra
Intermission
BERLIOZ Symphonie fantastique

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 30, 2023 performance – Violin virtuoso Joshua Bell thrilled a large audience at Tanglewood today, playing Paganini’s Violin concerto No. 1 on a program that opened with a piece inspired by politics and closed with a piece inspired by love.

Mr. Bell has not been a stranger to the Berkshires audience since his July 1989 debut here. The first Boston Symphony Orchestra performance of this concerto was in 1883, but it wouldn’t be until 1978 that it was played in the Koussevitsky Music Shed, by Shlomo Minz; Midori gave the previous performance in 1987.

As much as we’re fans first and foremost of the orchestra, it is important every season to attend one or two programs that include master soloists, not only for the singular thrill of their playing, but to be reminded of the role of the instrument itself – its various qualities and how it communicates with its many instrument-siblings.

Following intermission, the orchestra played Music from the ballet Romeo and Juliet, Opus 64, by Prokofiev. This selection offers perfect accompaniment to a sunny summer afternoon with friends. It won’t interfere with any daydream you may wish to indulge, nor will it bore you to sleep!

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 23, 2023 performance – The bright highlight of this program is the composition and playing of Jeff Midkiff, whose Mandolin Concerto, From the Blue Ridge, fully displayed the versatility of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, under the sure baton of Thomas Wilkins, Principal Conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, and the BSO’s Artistic Advisor. Although it wasn’t a full house, the ovation that greeted the composer and his colleagues afterward was as full-throated as I’ve heard in a long time. (see views of Tanglewood LawNation)

It’s commonplace to consider Jazz as the only musical genre made in America, but, that’s only true if you overlook Bluegrass. With the mandolin at its core, Bluegrass emerged as a distinct genre in 1940s Appalachia, taking the name of Bill Monroe’s band, the mandolin virtuoso who got the Bluegrass ball rolling. Taken together with Friday’s performance of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, this has been a hoedown weekend in the Koussevitsky Music Shed, lacking only a few bales of hay.

It being a quintessentially beautiful July afternoon in the Berkshires, at intermission, we swapped Shed seats for room on the lawn, which proved to be the ideal way to consume a big helping of Duke Ellington, with Maestro Wilkins and his charges giving an energetic and captivating reading to Ellington’s Suite from The River.

Boston Symphony Orchestra
Thomas Wilkins, conductor
Jeff Midkiff, mandolin
COLERIDGE-TAYLOR Ballade in A minor
Jeff MIDKIFF Mandolin Concerto, From the Blue Ridge
Intermission
ELLINGTON Suite from The River

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 21, 2023 performance – Today’s program featured the aptly sub-titled ninth symphony by the Czech composer Antonin Dvorák, which he wrote while on an extended visit to the New World. His time Stateside was split between NYC, where he was paid lavishly to direct the National Conservatory of Music and a town in Iowa, where a large cohort of Czech immigrants helped allay his homesickness. With Dandong, China native Xian Zhang at the podium, we Tanglewood patrons are well-reminded of the borderless nature of music! (Hilary Scott photos)

Ms. Zhang was masterful and energetic in leading the orchestra through Dvorak’s score; this is one of those rare compositions that sounds familiar, thanks to its widespread popularity, but which never sounds trite.

It should be always a happy occasion when an Aaron Copland composition is on the program at Tanglewood, which would be an alien place without the forty years he devoted to it. But, even though the performance was just lovely, the very idea of modifying anything as sacred as the collaboration between Copland and Martha Graham is a bad one.

What’s worse is the choreographer’s mistake in calling his derivative work, “Spring,” because his piece differs from the the Appalachian Spring of Copland/Graham, which he writes in the program was about life on the “American frontier.” I’m no geographer, but I know that both Appalachia and Appalachian music are nestled in the heart of America, not out on some imaginary frontier.

Boston Symphony Orchestra
Xian Zhang, conductor
Nimbus Dance
Samuel Pott, artistic director and choreographer

COPLAND Appalachian Spring
Intermission
DVOrÁK Symphony No. 9, From the New World

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 16, 2023 performance – This program played out during a lull in the rainy weather that has tried the patience of tourists and wreaked havoc with Tanglewood‘s acres of grasstop parking lots. Not only did the ticketed audience seem happy for the respite from rain, but the avian inhabitants of the grounds around the Koussevitsky Music Shed chirped their joy too.

That’s one of the best things about Tanglewood – the splendor of the Berkshires reminds us of our subordination to the reign of laws more perfect than the ones we dream up! And so we don’t begrudge sparrows and wrens from having their say.

keep politics out of music

I don’t know how anybody thinks it makes sense for any generation but his own to judge the character of a composer, but the sad fact is that Carl Orff seems destined to be blamed by posterity for not liberating Germany from Hitler.

Ludwig von Beethoven, on the other hand, had the good sense to born before the invention of radio, which is the mass media that extended the reach of politics beyond the well-read cohort to the hoi polloi, who always are putty in the hands of people like Mussolini, Hitler, and the Nixon-through-Trump machine.

Much of Beethoven’s music leads me to feel as if I’ve been returned to a primordial place, and it’s a worry-free place because politics only enters the Beethoven-sphere to remind us that the great man “undedicated” his third symphony to France’s own great tyrant, Napoleon! (see image) Today’s piece, Leonore Overture No. 3, one of the four overtures he composed for the opera Lenore, fairly sums up Beethoven’s work in the genre, which would’ve included more if things had gone his way!

Here is a link to the article we wrote about the previous performance of Carmina Burina at Tanglewood in 2009.

BSO program notes – July 16, 2023

Boston Symphony Orchestra
Andris Nelsons, conductor
Erin Morley, soprano
Reginald Mobley, countertenor
Will Liverman, baritone
Tanglewood Festival Chorus
?James Burton, conductor
Boston Children’s Chorus
?Emily Howe, conductor
?Kenneth Griffith, music director

BEETHOVEN Leonore Overture No. 3
ORFF Carmina burana

Sung in Latin with English supertitles