Tanglewood concert reviews

July 15, 2009 performance reviewed by Dave Conlin Read.

Everybody was a big winner when The Wheel of Fortune was presented in the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood, with Rafael Frubeck Du Burgos standing in for Pat Sajak, even if Vanna White was nowhere to be seen.

Of course we’re referring to the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, John Oliver conducting, PALS Children’s Chorus, Alyson Kegel, director, plus soprano Laura Claycomb, tenor Lawrence Brownlee, and baritone Markus Werba.

Carmina Burana, Latin for “Songs from Beuern,” is a collection of 254 poems and dramatic texts written in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by Goliards, clerics and students, in expression of their satirical view of the Church. The collection was found in 1803 in the Benedictine monastery of Benediktbeuern, Bavaria.

Orff, who had a parallel career teaching music to children, intended Carmina Burana to reveal the elemental power of music so that the audience could experience music as an overwhelming, primitive force. It’s global popularity, despite Orff’s failure in opposing Nazism, proves that he acheived his goal.

He selected 24 poems about the wheel of fortune from the manuscript and arranged them into “bawdy songs for soloists and chorus, accompanied by instruments and magic images.” In this performance, the magical images were left to the imagination, which didn’t need to work hard to conjure a delightful tableau.

The lyrics were streamed in English on a large LED screen above the chorus, drawing a variety of audible reactions from the audience. The Roast Swan movement from the In the Tavern scene was like a Vaudeville bit. It is silly enough on the page:

“Now I lie on a plate
and cannot fly anymore;
I see bared teeth.

Misery me!
Now black
and roasting fiercely.”

but drew nervous chuckles because it was sung by the African-American tenor Lawrence Brownlee.

Whereas the text was the genesis of the work, it certainly is of minor importance in the experience of it. Being able to read something of a simultaneous English translation of an ancient medieval text can add a layer of nuance, but can just as easily prove a distraction from a more purely visceral reception of the performance.

Perhaps it would be better to scan the text ahead of time, or even to read it after, ideally while mulling the performance with friends.

The program began with Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1 in D (Classical), played by a small configuration of the BSO. It seems like it could stand for the symphonic template, at least to this un-schooled auditor, feeling like a coherent series of melody and rhythm that arouses the attention right away and keeps it through to the conclusion.

Recent Tanglewood reviews/videos:

• Tanglewood schedule – August 14-23
• Sir James Galway at Tanglewood – 70th birthday celebration
• Brahms’ A German Requiem at Tanglewood July 28th, 2009
• video: Stroll around Tanglewood before Diana Krall’s July 4 concert
• Tanglewood 2009 season opens with Tchaikovsky July 4th, 2009
• A Prairie Home Companion at Tanglewood June 29th, 2009
• video: Arlo Guthrie plays City of New Orleans and duets w/ Garrison Keillor on Deep Blue Sea
• video: Steve Martin and The Steep Canyon Rangers play The Orange Blossom Special

August 1, 2009 performance reviewed by Dave Conlin Read.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s celebration of Sir James Galway’s 70th birthday was way more than an ordinary Saturday night at Tanglewood; it was a mini-festival of flute-centric music with an international flair.

The program opened with Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, Leonard Slatkin conducting the B.S.O., Elizabeth Rowe, flute solo. Debussy originally planned a larger work as a score of incidental music to accompany a reading or staged dramatization of Stephen Malarme’s eclogue, Afternoon of a Faun, but didn’t complete more than the Prelude.

This is one of those pieces of music where your enjoyment of the performance can scarcely be embellished by knowing much of the story behind its composition; better to affect a tabla rasa state and allow the conjuring of fresh images. Slatkin, Rowe, and the orchestra (for this piece, with a 3rd flute and Englsih horn, but without trumpets, trombones, and timpani) produced a lush, intriguing soundscape, on a moonlit night of perfect summer weather.

Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, Ballet for Martha, followed, a stunning work written for his friend Martha Graham, with the title of a Hart Crane poem. Copland is a quintessentially American composer, and this piece features the Shaker hymn, Simple Gifts, which serves as the ballet’s unifying theme. The performance readily cast us into a reverie of spring in the Northeast, with the recurring Simple Gifts motif evoking feelings of delight and surprise. This invitation to consider the wonders of Spring, in the midst of a summer of miserable weather, was especially welcome, and beneficial.

After intermission, the Galway celebration got underway with the world premiere performance of Swing Song, composed by Derek Bermel and commissioned by the B.S.O. for this occassion. Bermel said the short piece (five minutes) “is inspired by the cavorting of small monkeys through the trees of Bahai (Brazil)….The harmonica and rhythm is based on a fusion of Bulgarian and Latin dance forms.”

And why wouldn’t that be the basis for a work written in honor of Ireland’s preeminent musician and at-large musical ambassador! Celtic/Irish music is provincial only at inception and Galway, too has found musical homes far away from his native island. Witness his recent collaboration with Tiempo Libre, the Cuban-trained Latin jazz band who were his special guests tonight, along with contrymen Anthony Kearns, piano, and Michael McHale, tenor, and wife Lady Jeanne Galway.

In between the Bermel piece and the guest spots was the celebrant’s glistening performance of Mozart’s Flute Concerto No. 2 with the B.S.O. and Slatkin.

It was quite a party, carrying on past 11:30, including an American jazzified version of Londonderry Air (Danny Boy) by Kearns, plus an Emerald Isle version from the Galways, and ended with the 10,000+ audience singing Happy Birthday.

Recent Tanglewood reviews/videos:

• Brahms’ A German Requiem at Tanglewood July 28th, 2009
• video: Stroll around Tanglewood before Diana Krall’s July 4 concert
• Tanglewood 2009 season opens with Tchaikovsky July 4th, 2009
• A Prairie Home Companion at Tanglewood June 29th, 2009
• video: Arlo Guthrie plays City of New Orleans and duets w/ Garrison Keillor on Deep Blue Sea
• video: Steve Martin and The Steep Canyon Rangers play The Orange Blossom Special

July 25, 2009 performance reviewed by Dave Conlin Read.

We stepped away from the careening carousel that life in the Berkshires can become by late July to attend Brahms’ A German Requiem, on words from Holy Scripture, performed in the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood by the Boston Symphony Orchestra with James Levine conducting, Hei-Kyung Hong, soprano, Matthias Goerne, baritone, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, John Oliver, conductor.

Our need for a little inner quiet was met fully by this performance of the piece that served dual purposes for Brahms, addressing the deaths of his mother, Christiane, and of his mentor and spiritual father, Robert Schumann.

We arrived early enough to read Jan Swafford’s program notes, as well as the scriptural passages to be sung, drawn from 11 Biblical sources, including Matthew, Peter, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Corinthians, and Revelations. This is not a liturgical work, not a Mass; Brahms assembled the text from the Protestant Bible but omitted Christian dogma in favor of espousing a humanist view.

The opening and closing movements are similarly quiet and sombre, “Selig(Blessed)” the first and last word to be sung; at first, it is the living being blessed, or comforted, and then, finally, the dead, “…that they may rest from their labors; and their works do follow them.”

Brahms’ triumph, and tonight’s beautiful performance meant that the listener didn’t need the text in order to experience a full range of emotion, nor to be swept into a meditative state from time to time. For our part, we came away feeling that, as insignificant we may indeed be in the scheme of life, nonetheless there is magnificence to be experienced (or, to the experience) along the way, if we will.

The Truth that life is best lived in community was reenforced by the brilliance of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, which was first among equals in this performance; for all the artistry of tonight’s soloists, it seems that the solo parts could have been sung by ordinary choristers, as stand-ins for every man and every woman.

Their finest moment came with the verse from 1 Corinthians, where they loosed a tremendous, defiant sound, repeating (in German, of course) “O Death, where is they sting? O Death, where is thy victory?” Although the sound couldn’t be more different, we recognized the passage as being the likely source for the classic Bluegrass song “O, Death,” an a capella version of which earned a Grammy award in 2002 for Dr. Ralph Stanley.