Tanglewood concert reviews

James Taylor at Tanglewood July 4, 2022

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.
James Taylor at Tanglewood July 4, 2022; Dave Read photo

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.

James Taylor at Tanglewood July 4, 2022; Dave Read photo

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.

Mavericks at Tanglewood, June 26, 2022

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.

At The Mavericks concert, Tanglewood June 2022; Dave Read photo.

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.

Beethoven and fate at Tanglewood, July 11, 2021

Koussevitsky Music Shed, Tanglewood, the Berkshires; Dave Read photo

Article by Dave Read

The BSO program for July 11, 2021 included a concerto by Sibelius, a symphony by Dvorak, both natives of the 19th century, that were preceded by something composed by John Carlos, who was born during the Reagan administration.

Where else in the entertainment-scape can we find such fare, can we witness the work of a living artist yet wrestling with the gods of his genre? The genesis of Mr. Carlos’ work arises in an encounter with Beethoven’s notebook of 1815, wherein he read this:

“Iliad, The Twenty-second book.
But fate now conquers; I am hers; and yet not she shall share
In my renown; that life is left to every noble spirit
And that some great deed shall beget that all lives shall inherit.”

Carlos writes this in today’s program notes:

“We know that Beethoven strived to overcome many obstacles in his life and documented his aspirations to prevail, despite his ailments. Whatever the specific reason for including this particularly profound passage from the Iliad, in the end, it seems that Beethoven relinquished to fate. Fate now conquers.”

The performance was beautiful, and the composer was called to the podium where we hope he heard Beethoven’s own acclaim amid the audience’s hearty applause as it filled the Koussevitsky Music Shed.

Baiba Skride’s performance of the Sibelius violin concerto in D minor, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the BSO’s rendition of the Dvorak Symphony No. 6 in D, under the sure hand of Andris Nelsons, combined to make for a splendid afternoon of musical entertainment, on a day such as one wishes were the norm rather than the exception, this rainy summer.

Bloomberg Bombs in Tanglewood Debut, July 4, 2021

Up until the pandemic, Tanglewood patrons were accustomed to the indulgence of James Taylor songs on the Fourth of July. They expected a return to normalcy until the host communities set the attendance limit at 9,000, which caused Taylor to relinquish the cherished date to the plutocrat Michael Bloomberg.

US Army howitzers at Tanglewood, July 4, 2021, Dave Read photo.

Bloomberg is widely reviled in Massachusetts for being the man who spent $50 million in an attempt to install Scott Brown in the U.S. Senate seat held by Elizabeth Warren. Who knows how much he pays the BSO for use of the Boston Pops to market his view of an America segregated into a military class, an entertainer/performer class, and the hoi polloi?

Whatever the amount, it appears to be enough to let him overrule the BSO’s own pandemic protocols:

In support of regulations set by the Tri-Town Health Department and the Lenox and Stockbridge health boards, Tanglewood will limit attendance capacity to 9,000—50% of its usual capacity of 18,000; this represents a significant increase over the previously announced attendance cap of 25%.

Concert programs will not exceed 80 minutes and will be presented without intermission.

What took place July 4th at Tanglewood was an offensive 180 minute TV show. They got little right and screwed up totally by positioning 3 howitzers right next to the Shed, where the green benches used to be, for the finale of the 1812 Overture.

We’ve witnessed that piece at Tanglewood for decades, always with the artillery properly located on the Stockbridge Bowl side of the sloping lawn, and always to great effect. Tonight, instead of being an acoustic appendage to a musical score, it was an assault on the senses, utterly devoid of artistic merit.

It has been said that the end of all art is peace; neither peace nor art was in evidence tonight.

There was one spot on the program where this orgy of diversity-pandering could be redeemed. While the Boston Pops played in the background, a series of performers walked to center stage to proclaim quotations from the work of notable Americans of African descent, finishing each with the author’s name and the date of the quotation.

How did they omit this: “I can’t breathe, George Floyd, 2020?”

Christopher Eisenbach leads BSO and TFC in stunning Beethoven’s Ninth at Tanglewood

Christoph Eschenbach leads the BSO, TFC, Hanna-Elisabeth Müller, Sasha Cooke, Joseph Kaiser, and Thomas Hampson at Tanglewood August 26, 2018; Hilary Scott photo. — Christoph Eschenbach and Sasha Cooke at Tanglewood August 26, 2018; Hilary Scott photo.

Article updated August 30, 2018 by Dave Read

Spirits were yet scurrying back to their haunting places when Christopher Eisenbach took to the podium less than fifteen hours after the Bernstein Centennial Celebration to lead the Boston Symphony and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus in the program that would conclude the BSO’s Summer of Lenny in the Berkshires.

Like wedding guests who meet for lunch the day after before resuming the routine of their lives, the audience today couldn’t stop talking about what they’d witnessed yesterday.

So, let’s get on with it, let’s play the program and put the season to bed. A routine rendition of that splendid chestnut – Beethoven’s Ninth, although never expected here in the Koussevitsky Music Shed, may have been acceptable – just this once.

What Maestro Eisenbach and his charges delivered, however, was anything but routine, it was outstanding, so brilliant that it cut room for itself in memory, rather than settle for being an appendage to the events of the preceding eight weeks. We can attribute that to the two Bernstein works prefacing today’s program; traditionally, Beethoven has the season-ending concert to himself.

Something else added to my enjoyment – two silences, lacunae less than a second in length, but of profound depth – a tremendous bit of artistry, accomplished by a visiting conductor, orchestra, and amateur chorus. Bravo!

It was my uncanny luck to be seated adjacent to a woman who sang in the Berkshire Chorus, antecedent to the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, in the news this summer because of policies instituted by director James Burton, in the wake of founder John Oliver’s 45 year tenure. Before the concert, she told me that she sees merit on both sides of the re-audition issue; later, she said that they had never sounded so good. Charles Munch conducted the last program she was part of; and she sang at Maestro Koussevitsky’s funeral!

Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma at Tanglewood

Aug. 7, 2016 Tanglewood concert review by Dave Read

The Silk Road Ensemble, with Yo-Yo Ma, used the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood like a high school during their Aug. 7, 2016 performance, presenting both lessons in social studies and the senior assembly. Eighteen years since being co-founded by Yo-yo Ma at Ozawa Hall, the Ensemble presented a program that displayed their global roots, with segments being introduced by various members, each of whom stressed the social while while eschewing the pedantic.

The Silk Road Ensemble, with Yo-yo Ma performed at Tanglewood Aug. 7, 2016; Hilary Scott photo.

They talked about being ready now to leave home, after 18 years of growing up; but the effect of the concert was a synthesis of disparate musical traditions, culminating in a glorious global hoedown, to wit: Kinan Azmeh’s composition Wedding, his representation of a Syrian wedding celebration, a public jam session that could last for days. His dedication, to “all the Syriancs who have managed to fall in love in the past five years,” gave the audience an opportunity to express solidarity with those beleaguered people. An extra-musical takeaway from the evening was the opportunity to look at and celebrate the wild differeces among peoples without resorting to polemics. Extra-musical? yes – not beyond, but to the max!

The audience responded to the opening minute or so with tittering and noisy whispers, because of the novelty of a strange instrument on one side of the stage communicating with an equally unfamiliar one on the other side. By the time Fanfare for Gaita and Suona concluded though, the whole house was totally into the world music thing, and the party was on. The gaita is the bagpipe of the Galician people from the northwest part of the Iberian peninsula, the suona is a Chinese horn, and the piece was developed by the players Cristina Pato and Wu Tong, who are as dissimilar to each other in appearance as are their instruments.

Like many of their colleagues, these two were featured several times tonight; Wu Tong especially notable for his singing, including both Manchurian and English verses of Going Home, which may merit a place in World Music lore for being lyrics set to the score of Czech composer Dvorak’s 1893 New World Symphony while in America, and which sounds like a Shaker hymn! When everything is improbable, nothing is, so, another highlight of this show was the Ensemble’s almost cinematic rendition of Billy Strayhorn’s Take the A Train, which took the audience on a raucous, rumbling ride under the streets of Manhattan and Harlem, with images of Ella Fitzgerald and the Duke Ellington Orchestra flashing in their minds.