By Dave Read, July 24, 2026 performance – On the Tanglewood campus of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, music director Andris Nelsons conducted Mozart’s Violin concerto No. 5 in A, with Augustan Hadelich as soloist, followed by Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2 in D.
Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 is an especially beautiful piece of music, which sweeps an audience away in a flood of sonorous gold. The concerto opens as if an eternal aural flame has been re-kindled, when the soloist utters an authoritative, brief credenza that will reappear several times in the half-hour life of the performance. Tonight, although the program was quintessentially classical, the presence of the virtuoso Hadelich added an element from the world of jazz, since the credenzas performed were his own improvisations on Mozart’s score.
Artist-in-residence this season with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he plays a 1744 violin by Guiseppe Guarneri del Gesu; imagine the ocean of joy that has flowed from that hand-crafted instrument over the course of nearly three hundred years. His encore was his own arrangement of Schumann’s Träumerei from Kinderszenen, Op. 15.
Maestro Nelsons and his orchestra united as a force of nature during the Tchaikovsky symphony, filling the Shed and environs with a splendor of sound. It is one of life’s simple joys to press the mental “do not disturb” button to bask and revel in wave after wave of musical sense.
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