2022

For more than twenty years, we have been meaning to attend the public opening exercises of the Tanglewood Music Center, and on July 7, 2022, finally did. Thus, we’ve witnessed an almost sacred ritual, instituted in 1940 by Maestro Serge Koussevitsky, the high priest of musical culture in the Berkshires.

Since it also marks the formal (not the actual) start of an academic semester of the utmost importance to the student body, there is a little speechifying involved – but quieter and briefer than anywhere else in academe!

Three lovely recital pieces serve as preludes to the ultimate event in the exercise – the six minute choral piece Allelulia, which Koussevitsky commissioned Randall Thompson to compose for this purpose, sung by all the TMC Fellows, with Andris Nelsons conducting, while arrayed amid the audience in Ozawa Hall. It was breathtaking.

No need to take my word for it, listen here:

Go ahead, you’re worth it – spend five minutes, fifty-one seconds of your precious time on this:

Sung at Ozawa’s Farewell

Souvenir copies of the score were distributed to the audience at Seiji Ozawa’s Farewell performance, July 14, 2002; here is the inscription: “To the Berkshire Music Center, Serge Koussevitsky, Director. Alleluia – for four-part chorus of unaccompanied mixed voices.” It was first performed July 8, 1940 under the direction of Professor G. Wallace Woodworth.

With wife Kim home tending to Covid-positive son Harry, James Taylor wasn’t his usual relaxed, playful self Monday night in the Koussevitsky Music Shed, for his nearly annual Independence Day show.

The audience was way bigger than the one drawn to hear The Mavericks last week and, again, concert goers and visitors to the Berkshires were treated to another beautiful day.

This was a Fourth of July concert without much sparkle – yet it was a million times more pleasant than last year’s militarized spectacle, sponsored by the company of the carpetbagging plutocrat Michael Bloomberg, who spent 50 million dollars trying to help Scott Brown defeat Elizabeth Warren for the U.S. Senate.

By Dave Read – The first Sunday of summer 2022 was an ideal day for a concert at Tanglewood in the Berkshires – sunny, warm, and breezy enough to fly a kite. The main attraction in the Koussevitsky Music Shed was The Mavericks, a band born on the peninsula north of Cuba in 1989, then disbanded twice before the current outfit came together, which seems to me like a reincarnation of The Band.

That’s not half as crazy as it sounds, since The Band practically gave up the ghost just down the road from Tanglewood, at The Music Inn, where they played one of their very last concerts, before staging The Last Waltz out west in 1976.

Several sub-genres of popular music are represented by The Mavericks, and co-founding frontman Raul Malo’s vocals are rich enough for his exceptional bandmates to coalesce around, and carry the audience away on a nearly three hour party cruise.

Shouldn’t it be Canadiana?

Few things bewilder me more than the fact that the group widely regarded to be the progenitors of the musical genre to which marketers apply the sticker “Americana,” was made up of one American and four Canadians! Thank goodness Garth, Richard, Rick, & Robbie found their way to the new world – to the Promised Land, where Levon was born.

Having attended a few concerts by both The Band and The Mavericks, the one area where the former probably never will be surpassed is in the variety of the band’s vocalists – but if they had to choose one to settle on, they would’ve gone with the one most like Raul Malo.

The Englishman Nick Lowe and Los Straitjackets opened with a fifty minute set, which, inadvertenly, revealed the magnitude of the main act’s artistry, because, although very entertaining, it only amounted to a series a songs, while the The Mavericks ruled the universe for the balance of the afternoon via one massive soundgasm.