August, 2013 performance; by Dave Read

We arrived at Tanglewood on Parade in time for the 8pm round of brass fanfares, which preceded the gala concert in the Shed. At 2pm, brass fanfares at the Main Gate heralded the beginning of an all-day celebration featuring performances throughout the Tanglewood campus by Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center, Boston University Tanglewood Institute students, and members of the BSO.

3 orchestras and 4 conductors

The gala concert included the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Boston Pops, and Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra and four conductors. Charles Dutoit led the TMCO in Borodin’s Polovetsian Dances from Prince Igor, followed by the BSO, under the baton of Stephane Deneve, playing Gershwin’s An American in Paris. After intermission, Laureate Conductor John Williams led the Pops in his own The Cowboys Overture, then current Pops conductor Keith Lockhart led them in Bernstein’s Love Theme and Finale from On the Waterfront, and then conducted a concertino on Bond Themes with the Boston Cello Quartet.

1812 Overture w/o cannon

As always, Tanglewood on Parade was brought to a close with a fiery reading of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Missing this year, alas, were the field artillery on the lawn, which always added an extra dimension to the excitement when an earth-rattling fussilade was cued by the conductor onstage. Traditionally, Eastover Resort, whose founder was a collector of Civil War memorabilia, would loan a battery of about 8 artillery pieces to Tanglewood for the day. But after a recent change in ownership and sale of the cannon, maybe it’s time to check on the whereabouts of the Civil War cannon presented to Seiji Ozawa on the occasion of his last Tanglewood on Parade in 2001 as BSO music director?

July 27, 2013 performance; by Dave Read

Maestro Carlo Montanaro conducted a performance of Verdi’s Requiem at Tanglewood, leading four vocal soloists, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus in filling the Koussevitsky Music Shed and environs with sound sufficient to console, frighten, excite, and mollify. Verdi composed his “religious opera” in memory of his friend Alessandro Manzoni, using material (the Libera me) that he had originally composed for an abandoned collaborative work that was to honor Gioachino Rossini. Montanaro, substituting for the BSO’s new music director Andris Nelsons, injured when he banged his head on a door, swapped vacation plans for the seemingly immense job of leading 250 musicians in a performance of such a complex and familiar work.

It must have felt like deja vu all over again to BSO management, having finally settled on a young and fit successor to James Levine, whose BSO tenure was marred by lengthy stints on injured reserve. The Latvian Nelsons, who signed a five year contract BSO and threw the ceremonial first pitch for the Red Sox at Fenway Park the same day in June, probably doesn’t know the story of Wally Pipp, the New York Yankee first baseman who took a day off because of a headache in 1925, only to be substituted for by Lou Gehrig, who held the job every day for the next 14 years!

While he recuperated at home, Maestro Nelsons’ wife, soprano Kristine Opolais was on stage, along with mezzo soprano Lioba Braun, tenor Dmytro Popov, and bass-baritone Eric Owens, all of whom gave bravura performances. Here is how she described the accident to the Boston Globe “It was dark, and the door was closed, and he didn’t see it. He’s big, and he’s like a big child. It is comic.”

Attending such a performance at Tanglewood on a pleasant summer evening in the Berkshires, with a pretty full house and a very full stage holding some 200 musicians and singers, is a stimulating experience. Verdi’s Requiem opens in whispers and draws to a close in the quiet. That seems a particularly good musical idea, without a readily apparent real world analogue. Unless you view a life as an event that occurs between rests? At any rate, so one is led gently into and finally eased out of the terrific Sturm und Drang that comprises the lively 80+ minutes within. But music’s job on the mind ought not overwhelm its work on the body, so it is good to will the mind quiet during a concert. Not easy, but good.

Judging from the audience’s response, Montanaro hit it out of the park; the ovation was loud and sustained for ten minutes or so. And he enjoyed it too, sharing his response on Twitter:

Beautiful Verdi Requiem!!… Deep emotions and great music!.. Thanks to everybody for this touching performance!!..hope to see you soon..

— Carlo Montanaro (@carlomontanaro) July 28, 2013

July 13, 2013 performance; by Dave Read

Two nights after a merely modest audience was attracted to Tanglewood for the concert performance in Ozawa Hall of John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby, an ungainly horde assembled at the Koussevitsky Music Shed for a screening of West Side Story with the Boston Symphony Orchestra playing the score. While some of that can be attributed to Thursday vs. Saturday scheduling, an audience disparity in the neighborhood of 8 – 1 cannot be overlooked. (See our review of John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby)

Both programs featured genre-swapping hybrids with significant Tanglewood roots. The Great Gatsby was born a Book, became a Hollywood movie four times (plus TV movie and series), and an opera, when the Met commissioned it from Tanglewood Fellow, instructor, and administrator John Harbison in honor of former BSO Music Director James Levine.

West Side Story was an idea of choreographer Jerome Robbins who brought it to Leonard Bernstein, a member of the first class in 1940 of the Tanglewood Music Center. It opened on Broadway in 1957, with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by Arthur Laurents. It won 2 Tonys out of 6 nominations; the 1961 movie won 10 of 11 Oscars. That doesn’t mean that the movie adaptation was that much better, but it sure was an overwhelming success.

Tonight’s presentation may be deserving of awards for the myriad technical work that it represents, deleting the orchestral score while maintaining the dialogue and lyrics, for example, but we found it somehow lacking. Rather than cohere into a unified artistic expression – a sensory experience of some measure, it remained in parts: 1. Leonard Bernstein’s score, 2. the heavily re-worked movie. (Besides, the Shed plus 15k patrons make for an infelicitous film venue.)

While these concerns colored the overall experience, they didn’t lessen the excitement of so many passages, particularly the brilliantly operatic songs America, Cool, which seemed to get an additional buoyancy from the orchestra’s masterful playing. The BSO, under David Newman’s muscular direction, delivered the tour de force performance required by so-varied a score. The orchestra was augmented tonight by mandolin, electric guitar, drum kit, and several additional brass players.

But, what’s the point of monkeying around with something that worked so well the first time around? Why not work up an Opera version, instead, which is the genre Bernstein originally proposed when Robbins told him he wanted to make a modern day version of Romeo and Juliet? And then schedule it for a Saturday night!

The usual Film night at Tanglewood, featuring a performance by the Boston Pops of music composed by John Williams for movies often directed by Steven Speilburg, is scheduled for Aug. 24; tonight’s conductor David Newman will return to the podium for that program.

July 11, 2013 performance; by Dave Read

The concert performance in Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood of The Great Gatsby, by the orchestra and chorus of Emmanuel Music, was so enjoyable that we’re tempted to propose a corollary to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s adage, There are no second acts in American lives, to wit, American novels can get third lives.

None of the movie versions of The Great Gatsby has achieved anything near the stature of the novel, but we think the opera has legs and can give the book a run for its money. Whereas Fitzgerald’s standing as a prose stylist cannot be ignored, his choices relating to plots and characters can make it easy to overlook his books. But it is precisely the contrivedly tragic plot and one-dimensional characters that make Gatsby such a good fit for Opera.

We particularly enjoyed the performance of baritone David Kravitz as Nick Carraway, the steady narrator, and we came to prize soprano Devon Guthrie, who got Daisy Buchanan off to a slow start, only to hit her stride and then practically blow the roof off the joint in the middle of Act ll.

Composer John Harbison, recipient this month of the BSO’s Horblit Award and present tonight, was commissioned in 1998 by the Metropolitan Opera to compose the opera in honor of James Levine’s 25th anniversary there. Since then, there have been several related projects including the compilation of a Gatsby Suite. In the program notes, Mr. Harbison, whose Tanglewood relationship includes stints as a TMC Conducting Fellow, faculty member and coordinator of the composition program, calls tonight’s performance a revival.

Ozawa Hall was a lovely accompanist for the performance on a rare comfortable July evening, with a near-capacity audience indoors and a good compliment of West Eggers peering on from the lawn.

July 7, 2013 performance; by Dave Read

Opening weekend of the BSO’s 2013 Tanglewood schedule called for a performance by the Boston Pops with special guest Vince Gill; an ill-timed thunderstorm blew the planned program out the window. Instead of a 2:30 start for the Pops’ set of seven selections and a second set with Gill and his band after a 25 minute intermission, what transpired was a single 85 minute concert.

Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockart led the Pops through a truncated set designed to celebrate the American West. Besides two selections from Rodeo, by the familiar and decidedly unWestern Aaron Copland, the highlight of the set was Carmen Goes Country, a recent gift to the Boston Pops from its former principal arranger and Harmonica Rascal Richard Hayman.

Vince Gill mines the jazz vein

Vince Gill’s setlist included Whenever You Come Around, his paean to wife Amy Grant, and concluded with his lament for his brother, Go Rest High on That Mountain. His compositions were well adapted to the Pops’ accompaniment; often the result was a rich burnishing. The one exception was his new “legitimate jazz song” Faint of Heart, which got the endorsement of jazz diva Diana Krall, who sings it with him on his new album The Time Jumpers.

Placing a song from any musical genre within a symphonic setting is a risk almost always worth taking, at least for the sake of artistic curiosity. But when an artist is already stepping out from the comfort of his genre to experiment in another, taking the further step of giving it a symphonic wrap dulls the point of writing a jazz song in the first place. We look forward to hearing it late some night in a dingy roadhouse joint, which is the milieu it seemed to suggest, beneath the too-lush embellishment of the orchestra.

Gill is a friendly and funny guy who recalled his previous Tanglewood performance along with Amy Grant, when they were guests on a James Taylor program. Mentioning Taylor’s presence for this concert, he said that singing Sweet Baby James with him was a dream come true.