Tanglewood concert reviews

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 9, 2023 performance – The featured composition on the program, in the Koussevitsky Music Shed, for the first Sunday of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2023 Tanglewood tenure, the Brahms Violin Concerto in D, Opus 77, was performed brilliantly by violin soloist Hilary Hahn, artist-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Wigmore Hall in London!

This concerto by Brahms is a thrilling symphonic work with enough twists, turns, and tempo modifications to keep the mind fully engaged for the duration. (Perhaps the caesura at the end of the adagio may fool you into rustling for your car keys!)

As the concluding movement gets underway, however, there’s no room for doubt, except for how such a radiantly gowned woman could be responsible for such “fire, flash, and energy” as Steven Ledbetter describes the concerto’s finale in the program – and which ever-so-aptly describes today’s performance by Ms. Hahn.

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 4, 2023 performance – James Taylor‘s 2023 Fourth of July concert at Tanglewood, the veritable summer home to music in America for nearly a century, has come to feel, nearly fifty years after his debut here, like an annual rite of mythic popular entertainment.

Hustled, as we Americans seem to be, into states of terminal teenage dependency by the ubiquitous marketplace, we gather annually to hear James testify that recovery is available to all who fall, and that if you reach out for help, you may wind up auditioning for half the Beatles before you’re old enough to vote.

James Taylor is generous as any musician on the scene, and, in the company of the best “session” players available in LA, NY, and Nashville, every concert of his is bound to be a good one. They are usually of the “an evening with” variety – part automythology and family man, part singer/songwriter, and part rock star kickin’ out the jams.

(Fans of Elvis Costello may be interested in my take on his appearance in Bob Dylan’s Philosophy of Modern Song.)

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 1, 2023 performance – This concert in the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood could’ve been promoted as a celebration of the instrument at the beating heart of American popular music – the guitar.

And what would that music be without contributions from our cousins across the pond? Elvis Costello is an England-born Irishman who adopted the first name of one of our own kings, as well as Mr. Presley’s dedication to the audience! Costello is married to Diana Krall, the brilliant jazz musician from another former colony (now suffering massive forest fires) who has performed at Tanglewood several times. (Click any image to scroll them all; Hilary Scott photos.)

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Added to his band of Imposters for this concert was Charlie Sexton, a guitar prodigy who has been stunning audiences since his emergence as a teenager in Austin in the early 1980s, and whose impressive resume includes stints in Bob Dylan’s band. Longtime bandmate Steve Nieve was given ample opportunities to display his keyboard chops as were bassist Davey Faragher and drummer Pete Thomas.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Costello has a fervid fanbase that keeps up-to-date by way of a wiki, where you’ll find much more information, including the setlist for this show.

The opening act would be the featured act in most other circumstances – but this is Tanglewood, where one must be ready to receive more than was bargained for! Nick Lowe and Los Straitjackets, four guitarists and a drummer, opened with a rousing 45 minute set that had the force and the versatility of the guitar on full display. Lowe is a friendly and funny frontman, even if amplification makes it difficult to understand him word-by-word. This is his second consecutive appearance on the Tanglewood schedule. Now, let’s go for the threepeat!

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.