Tanglewood concert reviews

By Dave Read, June 21, 2026 performance – Tanglewood’s beautiful and versatile Ozawa Hall proved a fair haven for devotees of Yacht Rock, an unabashed nostalgia for a time not long ago, but which now feels like an ancient age.

My pop music memory reaches all the way to a time when church and civic halls hosted weekend dances for high school kids, with local bands blasting out covers of the latest hits heard over and over on the radio and American Bandstand. With such quaint things as free radio and TV relics of the ancient age, the Yacht Rock revue carries delicious youthfulness to patrons long since gone from high school.

Whereas the bands at my teenage dances had scant time to hone their chops and learn the new hit songs, the musicians who comprise the nearly twenty year old Yacht Rock Revue have their sets down pat and transition with seamless ease through ABBA, Steely Dan, Hall & Oates, Toto, Jackson Browne, Fleetwood Mac, and dozens more. And instead of sporting letter sweaters, the varsity in attendance today wore captain’s hats!

By Dave Read, August 31, 2025 performance – The 2025 season of music at Tanglewood wound up the day before Labor Day, with Bonnie Raitt headlining a bill that included Jimmy Vaughn with his Tilt-a-Whirl Band. For someone who fell into the Blues bag as a college kid in Boston, around the same time Ms. Raitt began her Blues apprenticeship across the Charles River in Cambridge, this was a nice way to close the season.

Because fickle fate never takes a day off, the incompetence of traffic cops had us stuck in jam for nearly an hour, costing us all but twenty minutes of Jimmy Vaughn’s opening set. The loss is more sorely felt because that twenty minutes is on par with any twenty minutes ever spent at the Blues trough.

For all the majestic beauty of the guitar when played by musicians as great as Vaughn and Raitt, twenty minutes within earshot Jimmy Vaughn and the Tilt-a-Whirl Band will make you wonder why every guitar slinger doesn’t buttress the manipulation of guitar strings with a dollop of ballsy brass!

The piece he ended his set with reminded me of a concerto, the guitar in conversation with the brass section, such is the way one perceives musical performance, in the aftermath of an eight week series of symphony concerts!

One of the most attractive features of the blues is that, as a discrete genre, it is as firmly rooted in tradition as it is determined to propel the tradition into the future. The way that happens is on the stage through performance, not in the studio or via digital editing.

Cover and tribute bands do the opposite because their audience are on nostalgia trips, and want only to hear tunes played exactly the way they were back in the day. They ain’t interested in progress, they’re regressive, like republicans.

By way of an encore, Ms. Raitt called her colleagues back to the stage for a tasty jam session, which worked such magic on me that I forgave the knuckleheads responsible for the traffic jam on the way home. Can’t wait to see who our friends at the BSO bring into the Shed next summer. Bonnie Raitt’s band included Duke Levine, guitar, vocals, James “Hutch” Hutchinson, bass, Ricky Fataar, drums, and Glenn Patscha, keyboard, vocals. Accompanying Jimmie Vaughan were Billy Pitman, Rhythm Guitar, Jason Corbiere, Drums, Billy Horton, Bass/Vox, and the Texas Horns: Al Gomez, Trumpet, Kaz Kazanoff, Tenor Sax, John Mills, Baritone Sax.

By Dave Read, August 30, 2025 performance – All I knew about Lynyrd Skynyrd, besides the unavoidable party anthems Freebird and Sweet Home Alabama, was that the musical wizard Al Kooper had “discovered” them. Anybody audacious enough to insinuate himself into Bob Dylan’s career, and play a key role in shaping the greatest song in rock n’ roll history – Like a Rolling Stone, is somebody I’m going to pay attention to.

Here is Al Kooper describing how he “discovered” Lynyrd Skynyrd.

And so, I was excited to attend my first Lynyrd Skynyrd show, even if none of the musicians Kooper produced are alive. It was fun enough to hear their renditions of the two anthems, but it was sad to hear them do their other big hit, What’s My Name, and sad to see the audience so eager to boogie along. The song is an anthem to people who like ’em young, like Jeffrey Epstein, Matt Gaetz, and the ogre from MarALago.

By Dave Read, August 14, 2025 performance – Tonight’s concert was the sort of program Ozawa Hall was designed to accommodate at Tanglewood, which is to say amplify and transmit into the countryside, for a further blending of human voices with the natural setting that enfolds them.

The Sixteen are a choral ensemble founded in 1979 by Harry Christophers, who conducted tonight’s performance. The choral group includes six sopranos, and four each of alto, tenor, and bass.

No less a span of seventeen centuries is represented in tonight’s repertoire, which consisted of lyrics and music composed by Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), Arvo Part (b. 1935), William Byrd (1540-1623), and St. Patrick (372-466).

At the risk of seeming profane, one needn’t be a subscriber to any of the represented religious sects in order to be delighted by tonight’s concert. Love of music would suffice; special devotion to the music of artfully-trained voices is rewarded especially.

Except to the adept, the program wouldn’t appear to be very dynamic, nor even captivating – but, that is exactly what it was. From the first note to the last, The Sixteen and Maestro Christophers commanded the audience’s rapt attention. And certain pieces required certain placement of singers; that alone shows a fascinating aspect of choral music.

My own attention was such that I thought I could discern individual, discrete voices, even as they weave themselves into a single, rich tarton of delicate tone. It’s neat that ten days after this evening of choral art, Tanglewood presents the annual choral-orchestral extravaganza, Beethoven’s Ninth, and so transports us from the sublime to the spectacular.

By Dave Read, August 8, 2025 performance – Tonight’s performance at Tanglewood of Symphonie espagnole in D minor, for violin and orchestra by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andres Orozoco-Estrada with violin soloist Joshua Bell brought the composer, Edouard Lalo (1823-92), up from the depths of my musical ignorance to the first echelon of favorite composers.

The five-movement piece, written for a Spanish virtuoso friend of the composer, put both Mr. Bell and the BSO on full display of their own virtuosity. From the audience, one got a virtual workout merely following the sound around the orchestra as first this section then that one was emphasized.

I think there’s a tendency for a casual fine arts consumer such as myself to pay undue obeisance to subtlety and understatement. That stance was upset immediately tonight by the almost cartoonish open in Lalo’s symphony. It felt to me as if the composer wished to remind audiences that forthwith comes a big bright orchestra in concert with a spectacular violinist. Having gotten our attention in no uncertain tones, the orchestra and Mr. Bell carry us along for an exciting exploration of musical vertuosity.

After intermission, Maestro Orozoco-Estrada was vigorous in the orchestra’s thoroughly satisfying performance of Antonin Dvorak’s familiar Symphony No. 9 in E minor, From the New World. Written during the Czech composer’s New York sojourn at the National Conservatory of Music, the piece is informed by Dvorak’s affection for both native and African American music. His reputation for weaving motifs and themes from folk lore into his compositions led to the New York job, hoping to add American works to the orchestral canon.

By Dave Read, July 29, 2025 performance – Emmylou Harris and Graham Nash delivered a wonderfully entertaining evening of music in the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood, a venue they each first played fifty years ago. It was a treat to see and hear such seasoned performers in full command of the musical artistry that carried them to fame in the ’60s and ’70s.

Nash performed seated because of a recent fall in NYC – “but, I didn’t fall on my voice,” he said before leading his band through a set of fourteen songs, with an emphasis on his time with Crosby Stills and Nash + Young. Unlike so many aged performers whose insecurity spoils their stagecraft, Nash interspersed songs with amusing anecdotes. His band included the multi-instrumentalists Adam Minkoff and Zach Djanikian, and keyboardist Todd Caldwell.

If the performance of Mr. Nash and band was primarily a welcome and vigorous visit to earlier decades, Ms. Emmylou Harris’s set showed us that time has a way of standing still, as it appears to have for her. Wrapped in a cloud of white locks, she remains a presence as she did when introduced to the ages in the closing segment of The Last Waltz, singing Evangeline with The Band. Accompanied by her Red Dirt Band, which now includes John Prine’s bassist, Ms. Harris treated the audience to a survey of her diverse repertoire.

And she is an engaging hostess, telling of an early interest in theatre that involved Tanglewood and also referencing the Down East humor of Marshall Dodge, which got no reaction, sadly, because, among other reasons, the Berkshires ain’t quite Down East.

Graham Nash and Emmylou Harris at Tanglewood setlists, July 29, 2025.

Graham Nash
Wasted on the Way
Marrakesh Express
Military Madness
I Used to Be a King
Simple Man
Immigration Man
Love the One You’re With
Better Days
Bus Stop
Just a Song Before I Go
Our House
Encores: Teach Your Children, Woodstock,Suite: Judy Blue Eyes

Emmylou Harris

Birds – with Graham Nash
Easy from Now On
Orphan Girl
Making Believe
Red Dirt Girl
Gulf Coast Highway
One of These Days
Kern River
Right Now
Wheels
Ooh Las Vegas
Prayer in Open D
Michelangelo
Goin’ Back to Harlan
Together Again
Save the Last Dance for Me
Rose of Cimarron
Encore: Boulder to Birmingham