By Dave Read, July 19, 2026 performance – Today’s matinee concert in the Koussevitzky Music Shed at Tanglewood by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, music director Andris Nelsons conducting, was the epitome of what a concert should be; the appearance of rose boutonnieres on stage and throughout the audience a reminder of the divided society we inhabit.
The concert opened with Symphony No. 22 in E flat, The Philosopher, composed in 1764 by Franz Jopseph Hayden, and only played once before by the BSO, fifty years ago, at Tanglewood. With only one other performance in the orchestra’s 145 year history, this is an example the programming philosophy that resulted in the Stand with Andris movement, symbolized by the red rose. Musicians such as Maestro Nelsons work in service to the Muse, not to the diverse communities that buy concert tickets. That is the misalignment that precipitated the fraught tempest in the BSO’s teapot.
Out of alignment are the Trustees, whose mission is to serve the muse-devoted artists of the orchestra, not Mammon, already well-served by the Boston Pops, as well as by the whole gamut of pop music. You can serve Mammon or you can serve the Muse, but you cannot do both things at once.
Maestro Nelsons is a compelling visual presence; his movements on the podium make it seem as if the score uncoils from him during the performance. The first thing we noticed during his initial Tanglewood performances 13 years ago was how often he reached back to the podium during performances. He was setting roots in the Shed, but not deep enough, it seems, to withstand uprooting by the bean counters in Boston.
The interplay between two virtuosos, pianist Danill Trifonov and BSO trumpeter Thomas Rolfs made the Shostokovich concerto especially entertaining. That such disparate objects as the piano and the trumpet can so contrast and compliment one another lays at the innate joy of symphonic music.
To conclude the program with Beethoven’s life-affirming second symphony, as may have been said before, is procisely why places like Tanglewood exist.
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