2024

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 But such only swaps German words for English words – there’s no way to translate those outdated German attitudes and mores into the American attitudes and mores we rep in the 21st century.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.

By Dave Read, July 1, 2024 – Roger Daltry looked as fit June 22, 2024, if less hirsute, as he did in August 1970 when he made his Tanglewood debut, thanks to the great Wolfgang Bill Graham who brought The Who and many other first generation rock bands and musicians to Tanglewood.

You’ll do yourself a favor, especially if you’re a fan of The Who, by firing up their Tanglewood concert on Youtube. You’ll see how efficient bands were then, when they needed nothing but instruments, amps, and envelope-pushing music to entertain an audience.

I’ve seen/heard enough of them to know that contemporary musicians and songwriters are every bit as talented as their rock ancestors – but all the extra fluff and flashbang that encumbers their shows betrays an insecurity that did not inflict the pioneers of rock ‘n roll.

Under the rubric of pop music, or even classic rock, what today’s audience seems to crave as entertainment is franchise music – original music has gone the way of the greasy spoon, replaced by microwaveable eggamuffinz in gas stations coast to coast.

And speaking of coast to coast, forget about the San Francisco sound, or new tunes bubbling up from the Village, or the bayou, Mississippi Delta, the Piedmont.. . Vulture capitalism has melted them down into an alloy of tunes that won’t tarnish, nor startle, nor teach you to boogie, much less make you lose your mind the way kids did then, back in the day.