Tanglewood concert reviews

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 26, 2024 performance – Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Andris Nelsons chose, as the downbeat to the BSO’s Koussevitsky 150 Celebration weekend, the Tanglewood founder’s Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra, Opus 3, and Edwin Barker, the orchestra’s principal double bassist, as soloist. That must’ve felt especially gratifying to Barker, who is set to retire next spring.

No matter how intently I listened, as the the music filled the Shed and environs, I kept imagining the composer, as he conducts score upon score of violin, flute, and piano concerti, say to himself (soto voce), “double basses do it better!”

Maestro Koussevitsky (1874-1951) was soloist when the symphony was premiered in Moscow in 1905. Somehow, tonight marks its Tanglewood debut. Let’s hope there’s a more reasonable interval before it’s heard again in the Koussevitsky Music Shed, at the heart of Koussevitskyania, a.k.a. Tanglewood.

Oddly enough, the written word was elevated to the level of heard music for the pair of pieces performed post-intermission, The Origin of Fire, for baritone, male chorus, and orchestra, opus 32, by Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) and Prometheus, Poem of Fire, Opus 60, for piano, chorus, and orchestra, by Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915).

Over the heads of the orchestra hung a screen upon which first streamed text from the Finnish creation myth, Kalevala, then the more universal, but no less mythic, Prometheus poem.

Tonight’s program taught me not to be dismissive of the intrusion of text into what I hope and expect to be a sonorous, rather than a literary, occasion. That is because I followed along with much of the Finnish myth, and was delighted at its childlike innocence.

We are introduced to the wet nurse assigned to the care and feeding of the infant nation, informed that she “holds the ‘sparklet’ with confidence,” until she drops it, and it falls through nine protective levels before it splits the earth in two. That sure beats the myth of Columbus, the Pilgrims, and the new 1619 Myth recently proposed by the New York Times.

Yefim Bronfman was soloist for the concluding piece and James Burton conducted the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, which gets another star turn during the program on Sunday, to conclude the Koussevitsky celebration weekend. The chorus, an organization of amateurs, never fails to enrich the work of their seated, professional colleagues.

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 21, 2024 performance – There was something of an amateur hour on this bright Sunday afternoon in the Kousevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood, the summer home in the Berkshires of the Boston Symphoney Orchestra.

The program opened with Three Places in New England (Orchestral Set No. 1), composed by Charles Ives (1874-1954), an insurance executive who composed music for personal edification, rather than for pay, which puts the distinction between amateur and professional in sharp focus.

Symphony orchestras are historically republican institutions, none more so than the one in Boston, a town so conservative that it’s where the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and Cabots speak only to God. The program notes that accompany today’s program indicate that we owe a big debt of gratitude to the orchestra’s “resident avant-gardist,” Nicolas Slonimsky, whose friend Henry Cowell, another amateur composer, introduced him to Mr. Ives.

The amateur composer paid to have it performed in Cuba and Europe by the BSO, but the glorious composition, which pays better and more lasting tribute to the Berkshires than a barrel of p.r. professionals ever could, wasn’t performed here until 2007.

Since then, it has been performed several times by the BSO, and seems likely to every so often steal an afternoon or evening from the composer’s canonized European colleagues, thanks to the formerly republican BSO!

Local and global favorite, Emmanuel Ax was the guest soloist for the Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Opus 37, of Beethoven. Maestro Nelsons elicited beautiful performances all afternoon from the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra on a program that concluded with the famous tone poem of Richard Straus, Also sprach Zarathustra.

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 19, 2024 – Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) composed The Age of Anxiety, with a commission from mentor Serge Koussevitsky, in the aftermath of WWII, after reading W.H. Auden’s poem of the same name. He issued a revised version of Symphony No. 2, for piano and orchestra in 1965, to undo its over reliance on poetics. He regarded it as “one of the most shattering examples of pure virtuosity in the history of English poetry.”

Every generation needs virtuosi like Bernstein and Auden (1909-1973), even if we still wind up where we are today, when the moving image of mass media has practically made the printed word obsolete.

Dina Slobodeniouk conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra and piano soloist Conrad Tao in this Koussevitsky Music Shed performance, on as pleasant an evening as the Berkshires produces this deep into summer.

It always is a special treat to listen to both a great soloist and a great orchestra and tonight was no exception. In response to the audience’s applause, Mr. Tao returned and paid tribute to Bernstein with an encore of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, the ballad Harold Arlen composed for Bernstein’s West Side Story.

While the music and poetry of Bernstein and Auden are immortal, the era they shared with each other is as alien to the general public as is the one shared by Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Johannes Brahms (1832-1897), whose Symphony No. 3 in F was performed after intermission.

Brahms is said to have composed it all at once during the summer of 1883 in Wiesbaden. In the artful hands of Maestro Slobodeniuk and the BSO, it proved a brilliant coda to a splendid evening of music.

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 5, 2024 event – Although I’ve been filing reports from Tanglewood since the Clinton administration, it wasn’t until 2022 that I attended the open-to-the-public Opening Exercises of the Tanglewood Music Center, which is the true heart and soul of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Tanglewood enterprise.

I was surprised to be among only a few score of civilians inside Ozawa Hall. Every time I enter that building I am awestruck at its simple majesty, the genius of the architecture. Speaking of which, did you know that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said that architecture is frozen music?

Besides brief remarks by the suits in charge, the event resolves to the a capella performance of the Alleluia chorus composed by Randall Thomspson with a commission from Serge Koussevitsky, the great man whose great vision now encircles the globe, every part of which sends students to Tanglewood and employs musicians trained there!

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 7, 2024 performance – Renee Fleming, the world-famous soprano, has been a favorite of Tanglewood audiences since her debut on the Koussevitsky Music Shed stage in 1991. Under the direction of Maestro Andris Nelsons, in concert with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, today she sang songs written for performance with music composed by Richard Strauss (1864-1949).

I have no idea what she was singing about, because when listening to music, I surrender myself to it, which means I turn off phones and screens and neither read nor write while the music unfolds itself into my imagination.

Since so many of my sisters and brothers in the Tanglewood audience feel otherwise, translated lyrics are flashed across a giant screen above the orchestra. But such only swaps German words for English words – there’s no way to translate those outdated German attitudes and mores into the American attitudes and mores we rep in the 21st century.

What I do have some idea about is how beautiful music makes me feel! Especially during Gesang der Apollopriesterin, Opus 33 No. 2, Ms. Fleming produced with her instrument sounds so refulgent that the instruments of the brass section turned green with envy. I didn’t say music makes me feel beautiful, I said I know how I feel while concentrating on the sounds produced by beautiful music.

All the sounds produced today under Maestro Nelsons’ energetic direction were splendid, every bit as splendid as is the venue that hosts Tanglewood. This Sunday matinee was performed on as beautiful a day as ever unfolds in the Berkshires.

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 8, 2024 –

Over the course of his long career, James Taylor has shared from the stage intimate biographical details, which he presents in more comprehensive fashion in an audiobook titled Break Shot. He is frank about the trauma of being uprooted as a young boy from the warmth of an old New England family into the furnace of the Jim Crow south, for his father’s medical career.

He acknowledges how he was launched into his own career by a chance encounter with a talent scout for Apple records. And, Taylor is as open about drug addiction and recovery as is anybody else in the entertainment business, and always presents an attitude of gratefulness for his career in that business.

We were in the vast audience at Tanglewood July 2, 2012 when JT shared his audience with Taylor Swift, who has since eclipsed in popularity not only James, but Jesus and the Beatles, too. Taylor Swith is no more musically gifted than James, Jesus, or the Beatles, but she has business sense to beat the band!

Although he has brought them onstage since they were little boys, now James seems eager to hand the keys to the family business over to son Henry, who seems glad to accept them. Whether young Henry’s paternal booster shot propels him to the same heights his father attained nobody knows. We can be certain, however, that his father has told him, and likely more than once, that it takes a hell of lot more than luck for any career to last fifty years, much less one that includes world class venues such as Tanglewood.