Tanglewood concert reviews

By Dave Read (July 31, 2022 concert) – Paul Lewis completed his Beethoven weekend with the matinee performance of Piano Concerto No. 5, Emperor, having performed 2 & 3 and 1 & 4 on Friday and Saturday nights.

In two respects, at least, Mr. Lewis is an outlier – he was born in England and now is a citizen of Ireland, and, at fifty, he is only ten years removed from his BSO and Tanglewood debuts. English emigres usually settle in America, and virtuosi usually make their classical music debuts before they are old enough to vote!

The artistry displayed by Mr. Lewis seems to include some measure of alchemy, as it makes the piano sound at once as large as the orchestra and a moment later no bigger than a zither.

The bright sunny Berkshires day, with a breeze off Stockbridge Bowl, is the ideal milieu for the wander amid one’s imagination impelled by the music of Ludwig von Beethoven. What a treat to have the great man’s work made manifest by such artists as Mr. Lewis, Maestro Nelsons, and the Boston Symphone Orchestra – how could any but the loftiest of thoughts and feelings result?

They cannot, if we’re left alone with the music; when we read Jan Swafford’s program notes, however, we’re reminded how contemporary all great thinkers are:

“What a destructive, disorderly life I see and hear around me, nothing but drums, cannons, and human misery in every form.” Thus spake Beethoven two centuries ago, and thus speak admirers of his music today.

By Dave Read (July 28, 2022 concert) – Paris-born and Berkshires resident, Yo-yo Ma, has handed the reins of the Silkroad Ensemble to Rhiannon Giddens, who was born in Greensboro, NC, and lives in Limerick, Ireland. Such personal details may not be required for membership in the world music community, but, in the words of the American sage Mark Twain: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness…”

Mr. Ma convened the original Silkroad Ensemble in Ozawa Hall in 2000, gathering musicians who play the music of peoples found along the metaphoric silk road, a network of trade routes that connected the occident and the orient for millinnia.

Previous Silkroad Ensemble concerts betrayed an instructional purpose, with the focus on locating the various instrumental and vocal traditions within their native social and political environments; the auditor was entertained and enlightened by way of a tantalizing buffet of discrete musics. (Our reviews: 2016, 2012).

Now all grownup, the Silkroad Ensemble feels more like a large band and their performance is way more concert than musical seminar. Yo-yo Ma delighted the audience by accompanying Ms. Giddons on an encore number – and got a big laugh when he pretended to fuss with the tuning of his cello while she did with her banjo.

Since being introduced to Dave Van Ronk more than fifty years ago, the blues has been my bag, and so I came away from this performance feeling as if I’d attended a blues concert. In fact, it was the great blues welfare organization, Music Maker Relief Foundation, that brought Rhiannon Giddens to my attention, when they released her first record in 2006.

Likewise, someone with a percussion prejudice may have left Ozawa Hall feeling as if, finally, drumming has been given the prominence it deserves.So too, could a devotee of the Celtic harp, or the pippa, violin, or flute, for that matter. What matters is that Rhiannon Giddens has become the nucleus of a big family of musicians who blend into one big gorgeous instrument that thrilled the full house and lawn of Ozawa Hall.

Her renditions of O Death and St. James Infirmary Blues are what lead me to file this concert in the same folder as such others in this venue as Sonny Rollins, Dave Brubeck, Jay McShann, Casandra Wilson, Duke Robillard, and Lousiana Red.

The reason music can be a force that unites peoples otherwise alienated from one another, is because it eschews polemic and does not pitch any particular point of view. Music, like all art, imitates nature, not culture, which is a man-made thing that divides people.

Would that someone invent a music-only microphone, which will transform the extra-musical talk of musicians into jabberwocky. Musicians should emulate Bob Dylan and let their music speak for itself. Trust us, dear virtuosi, we’ll know that if it sounds good, it is good.

By Dave Read [Lenox, MA, July 12, 2022] – The 2022 season is underway at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, on the vast tract of land given them early in the 20th century by the same cohort of proper Bostonians, who, a century earlier, gave refuge there to Nathaniel of Salem*, the poet who added Tanglewood to our lexicon.

On July 14, 2002, a copy of the 12 page score of Randall Thompson’s Alleliua, was distributed to the audience at Seiji Ozawa’s last concert, which concluded a weekend of festivities, in the Koussevitzky Music Shed. Serge Koussevitzky commissioned Alleluia in 1940, to be performed by the student body during opening exercises of the Tanglewood (nee Berkshire) Music Center.

I witnessed the opening exercises for the first time last week, which now are held in Seiji Ozawa Hall. They consist of a little speechifying, a couple brief recitals, and then “Alleluia, for four-part chorus of unaccompanied mixed voices.” The Fellows (nee students), seated where the paying audience usually does, produced a moment of transcendence, under the direction of Andris Nelsons, conducting from the lip of the stage.

With the student body well underway on the final measure of their professional training, the professionals were in the limelight for the BSO’s opening weekend of concerts, which comprised the orchestra’s familiar breadth of repertoire. They got underway with with their own Opening Prayer (Benediction), which was composed in 1986 by favorite son Leonard Bernstein, to mark the re-opening of the refurbished Carnegie Hall, followed by Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety, inspired by W.H. Auden’s poem, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue.

From the aftermath of WWII, we go to the eve of WWI to complete the opening night program with Igor Stravinsky’s La Sacre du printemps, Pictures from pagan Russia. The piece usually goes by the more familiar The Rite of Spring; perhaps the orchestra wants to call our attention to the savagery our Russian brothers are inflicting on their Ukraine neighbors today?

Saturday’s program featured a very new composition, with the composer invited to address the audience in advance, which left me unable to properly listen to the first moment of it because I was digesting his remarks about it. Carlos Simon told the audience that Motherboxx Connection has references in phenomena I’m utterly unfamiliar with – yet, I was delighted by the orchestra’s expression of them, in our universal language.

Soprano Nicole Cabell next did a star turn on Knoxville, Summer of 1915, Opus 24, with text by James Agee. She sang with a shimmering, colorful voice that instrumentalists spend their careers seeking to replicate. Two giants of pre-WWII American culture were called upon to close out the evening – Duke Ellington’s New World A-Coming, for piano and orchestra, with Aaron Diehl on piano, and then George Gershwin’s An American in Paris.

If we are to survive much longer, we must recognize the healing and binding qualities of music, and accept it as liturgy – for nothing divides us so readily as our Babel of doctrine and dogma. In the words of our beloved national divine** – “If it sounds good, it is good.”

*In his brilliant critical essay, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Herman Melville, of Pittsfield, calls him Nathaniel of Salem to draw a parallel to William of Avon, to suggest an equivalency between our in-state, literary genius and England’s Shakespeare.

**Louis Armstrong was an early participant in the summer seminars that grew into the Lenox School of Jazz, in the 1950s, just down the road from Tanglewood

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.