Tanglewood concert reviews

Tony Bennett Lady Gaga throng swamps Tanglewood

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.

2015 A Prairie Home Companion at Tanglewood

June 19, 2015 performance reviewed by Dave Read

The sixteenth Tanglewood broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion, with Garrison Keillor, took place Saturday June 27, 2015; it was the penultimate show of their 2014-15 season, and probably the penultimate show in the series that began in 2000 when Keillor instituted an instant Tanglewood tradition at the place where he and his wife had their second date.

Chris Thile, mandolin player and member of Nickel Creek and the Punch Brothers, will co-host two shows with Keillor next season before succeeding him as host. Thile has performed at Tanglewood as a guest on the 2011 Prairie Home show and in 2013 with Yo Yo Ma’s Goat Radio Show.

We’ve had the pleasure of attending all but one of these broadcasts from the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood, environs once occupied by Hawthorne, Melville, and Wharton. Besides an improbably diverse array of musical brilliance, such as the great Peter Rowan today along Sarah Jarosz, Sara Bareilles, and Nadia DiGiallonardo, the local shows almost always break new ground in the field of Berkshires literary archeology.

Garrison Keillor’s Berkshires literary archeology

An all-time favorite skit was Keillor’s account on the 2001 show of the most famous picnic in the history of American literature, the August 1850 picnic atop Monument Mountain, when Hawthorne and Melville met. Since nobody said Emily Dickinson wasn’t there, Keillor and the cast showed us how much fun the outing could’ve been if the Belle of nearby Amherst had made the trip. Erica Rhodes’ portrayal of a 19 year old Dickinson, eager for the affirmation of her literary elders, was a show-stopper.

The audience roared when she reached the closing lines of Dickinson’s beloved Time and Eternity, which begins, “Because I could not stop for death/He kindly stopped for me/…”

“The woods are lovely, dark with dew, Do-wacka-do-wacka-do-wacka-do.”

Today, the lighter side of Herman Melville was revealed by way of a quick exchange with Hawthorne that made him sound like a Borscht Belt comedian.

During an interview on Aspen Public Radio last week, Keillor said that to have Limericks he’s written “..be beloved among 10 year old boys twenty years from now” would be his “best stab at immortality.” With that in mind, we determined to compose one in his honor during Saturday’s show:

Tanglewood Limerick, for Garrison Keillor

The Tanglewood Shed sits near the mansion where
Boston bankers picnicked, and took care
Of Hawthorne, who’d got fired;
Now, rapt attention is required
When A Prairie Home Companion’s there.

You can listen to this show (and others), and read scripts at PrairieHome.org.

Watching Andris Nelsons conduct

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.”]

Beethoven Symphony 9 at Tanglewood

Article by Dave Read

The August 24 performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 was the final item on the 2014 schedule of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s season at Tanglewood, as it almost always is. It is such an immense work of art that to call it a fitting way to close the season is silly. Each eight week season of music by the BSO and their guests here in the Berkshires generates its own themes and patterns, hits and misses. Beethoven’s Ninth fits regardless where it gets scheduled.

Esteemed Maestro Charles Dutoit conducted today, eliciting a performance that was both ethereal and thrilling. And as they’ve done before, the amateurs of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus attained the same heights of perfection as their professional colleagues of the BSO.

We didn’t time the performance, but would guess that it was longish; it certainly wasn’t hurried, and we did slip into reverie in the first movement, which seems to invite the mind to detach, after establishing the basic theme, which ignites a long slow fuse of anticipation for its fulfillment an hour hence.

There was a vast audience today, occupying areas of Lawn that had been vacant since James Taylor’s concerts on July 3 & 4.

Wizard of Oz with Boston Pops at Tanglewood

Article by Dave Read

Billed as Oz with Orchestra, the Tanglewood presentation of a newly restored print of The Wizard of Oz, vocals and dialogue intact and paired with the Boston Pops’ performance of the original orchestration, made for a thoroughly entertaining experience. Way more than a mere nostalgia kick, it commanded your attention, leaving no room for daydreaming. Reflections on childhood viewings had to be postponed until afterwards, when an especially animated and chatty crowd strolled back to the parking lots around 11 PM.

Like many in the audience tonight, my experience with The Wizard of Oz dates back to the days of black and white television and the annual broadcasts from 1956 onward. I dug this movie from the get-go, even as an under-age iconoclast disapproving anything my sisters liked. And tonight I responded with the unbridled joy of an over-aged optimist!

Conductor Keith Lockart’s established versatility was on full display as he used a pair of digital devices to lead the Boston Pops in their supporting role. It was a seamless collaboration between the orchestra and the movie projected on a large screen overhead. They didn’t intrude, but their playing was a welcome embellishment throughout.

Two especially noteworthy elements were the color and the choreography. It was a riot of color, which I’d describe as psychedelic if it weren’t for how sharply defined every fanciful object and background was. And the choreography was a revelation. What I would’ve called clowning around when I saw it as a kid tonight looked like deceptively artful dancing. The scene where Dorothy encounters the Scarecrow may as well be called a pas de deux. Ray Bolger had a genius that made stumbling look poetic.

True enough There’s no place like home – but neither is there anyplace quite like Tanglewood, where fondly recalled experiences from childhood can be reprinted in memory in the most delightful Technicolor fashion.

Beach Boys at Tanglewood, Aug. 18, 2014

Article by Dave Read

The Beach Boys, in the persons of Mike Love, Bruce Johnston and replacements for Brian, Carl, Dennis Wilson, and Al Jardine, did an estimable job of re-creating the mid-60s pop music milieu during their concert at Tanglewood for an audience primarily in their mid-60s.

Love was energetic and engaging frontman; there was a big segment of the show when scores of people were allowed to cram the aisle along the stage and he traded high-fives with dozens of them. Then, as the band launched into Barbara Ann, the 1965 cover that was one of the band’s biggest hits, he helped a couple of young girls scramble onto the stage and eventually there were several youngsters rocking out, including one who got paired up with the lead guitarist. (Barbara Ann at 1:25 of the video)

Beach Boys play Good Vibrations and Sloop John B

The two hour show began with the band racing through an 8-song set of beach-specific songs and included dozens of the band’s most popular hits from “back in the day.” Also included were a couple of nicely done covers – California Dreamin’ and Why Do Fools Fall in Love and something new, Pices Brothers, which Love wrote in tribute to George Harrison. Personal favorites Good Vibrations and Sloop John B evoked welcome flashes back to the days of dusty stacks of wax!