Tanglewood concert reviews

July 8, 2015 Article by Dave Read

The Tanglewood Brass Spectacular featured performances by the Boston Pops Brass & Percussion section, the Boston Crusaders, the third-oldest drum corps in America, celebrating their 75th anniversary; and the sixteen-time Drum Corps International World Champion Blue Devils from Concord, California. The program was suggested by BSO trumpeter and drum corps alumnus Michael Martin, whose father Freddy Martin, one of the genre’s most esteemed figures, was a conductor and composer on tonight’s program.

First, the host ensemble performed a variety of pieces, including two by Boston Pops laureate conductor John Williams. They demonstrated why the Pops and the BSO always sound so good when they veer into the jazz and pop realms, because these players sure can swing! Then the Blue Devils and Boston Crusaders took turns, each filling the Koussevitsky Music Shed stage with an assortment of musical instruments never seen there before. Besides all the horns and drums, there was an array of vibrophones from wing to wing.

Massed bands perform Tcahikovsky’s 1812 Overture

The 2+ hour concert closed with an unprecented performance by all three ensembles of Tcahikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Tanglewood patrons are used to exciting performances of that chestnut as the finale to the annual Tanglewood on Parade, but tonight’s rendition was truly breathtaking.

July 6, 2015 Article by Dave Read

The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2015 Tanglewood season got underway with an all-American program of works by John Harbison, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and Duke Ellington. While BSO music director Andris Nelsons was conducting in Germany, the orchestra was led tonight by French conductor Jacques Lacombe, who made his Tanglewood debut last year.

Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F, with Kirill Gerstein

Gerstein, who has played twice before at Tanglewood, has quite a varied and impressive resume. While a youngster receiving classical training, he taught himself jazz and after coming to the attention of vibraphonist, composer, and jazz educator Gary Burton during a trip to the Soviet Union, he moved to Boston to study jazz piano, becoming at 14, the youngest student ever at Berklee College of Music, and spent two summers at the BU Tanglewood Institute. Today he is artist-in-residence at Berklee and member of the piano and chamber music faculty at the Boston Conservatory.

Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, Ellington’s Harlem

Sad to say, but the exuberance elicited by the first portion of tonight’s program made it difficult to attend with an appropriate seriousness to Aaron Copland‘s elegaic Licnoln Portrait, in the second – especially given the recent murders in Charlestown, SC, which deepened the sadness of how we have failed to attain the quality of nationhood envisioned by Lincoln. John Douglas Thompson, the actor who has performed frequently with Shakespeare & Co., was eloquent and powerful in the spoken part.

July 1, 2015 Article by Dave Read

As Lady Gaga herself mentioned from the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood early in her concert with Tonay Bennett June 30, 2015, it didn’t rain! But a steady drizzle and dreary skies did prevail all day long as a vast crowd assembled, causing miles-long traffic jams and overwhelming the usually efficient parking protocol at Tanglewood. With an hour to go before 8 pm showtime, Hawthorne St. was reduced to a single-lane parking lot – all the way back up Old Stockbridge Rd. to Lenox Town Hall. Tanglewood reported the audience a sellout of 19,000.

It seemed like a bigger audience than the 2012 James Taylor concert that included a guest appearance by Taylor Swift, but probably not equal to Taylor’s July 17, 2002 concert, with the Boston Pops, that set the Tanglewood attendacne record – 24,470, and which led to the B.S.O.’s agreement with the towns of Stockbridge and Lenox to cap ticket sales at 19,000.

Tony Bennett sings Cheek to Cheek with Lady Gaga

Altogether the concert included 31 songs in about two hours; duets included their grammy-winning Cheek to Cheek and Anything Goes, while Bennett did a set of Frank Sinatra songs, mentioning the Sinatra Centennial celebration later this year in Las Vegas. Ms. Gaga reminded us that Ole Blue Eyes called Bennett the greatest singer in the world. Besides all the costume changes and vamping, the highlight of her performance was a beautiful rendition of La Vie En Rose. They have taken the entertainment world by storm since teaming up a couple years ago, and this is no novelty act. Nearing 89, Tony Bennett simply sounds great – still. Nearing 30, Lady Gaga sure has chops, and it shouldn’t belong before she’s a great singer, too.

Dec. 6, 2014 Article by Dave Read

Reading the New Yorker is always an entertaining and edifying activity, and sometimes more, such as when I got a rush of sympatico from an article by Alex Ross in the Dec. 1, 2014 issue, Brushfires; Andris Nelsons energizes the Boston Symphony. The caption of the accompanying illustration reads, “On the podium, Nelsons, a galvanic young Latvian, lunges about uninhibitedly.” It remined me of my effort to describe Maestro Nelsons during his first Tanglewood concert since being named BSO Music director, the July 11, 2014 program featuring Anne-Sophie Mutter performing Dvorak’s Violin Concerto.
“There was a moment toward the end of the Violin concerto, with Ms. Muter at rest, when he almost stepped off the podium, crouching and reaching toward the violins to draw forth a soft passage. He left footprints and handprints all over the podium, like an animal marking territory.”

lexicon of the music critic

Being totally unschooled in the lexicon of the music critic, I’m pretty much left to write about the appearance of a concert, leaving the cognoscenti to describe how the music sounds in relation to how they think it should sound. Orchestras such as the Boston Symphony project a uniform, practically static image, which makes it easy for the conductor to be the focus of my attention, as he (and sometimes she) articulates his musical directives by way of gestures. And this gesticulation can range from eloquent to akward, from geriatric to gymnastic, from martial to manic.

In his New Yorker article, Ross says that “… Nelsons lunges about uninhibitedly, violating textbook rules about the wisdom of minimizing one’s gestures. I imagine that Boston players have already mastered imitations of his signature moves: the Backward Lean, the Extreme Crouch, the Trapeze Grab, the Across-the-Table Ice-Cream Scoop.”

So it is good to know that a respected music critic deems a conductor’s gesticulations worthy of more than a passing mention, and that the lexicon needn’t be staid. It feels like getting permission to be playful even while writing about highbrow stuff! Thanks to Alex Ross, I’ll take a stab at adding to the lexicon when Nelsons returns to Tanglewood next July.

[bctt tweet=”Watching Andris Nelsons conduct.”]