This video of James Taylor being accompanied by Yo-Yo Ma on Sweet Baby James, recorded Sept. 15, 2008 on the porch of the Red Lion Inn at Stockbridge, is blowing up the Internet – at least my little piece of it!
Tanglewood concert reviews
Richard Thompson at Tanglewood, June 21, 2019
By Dave Read – Richard Thompson strode to center stage in Seiji Ozawa hall June 21, carrying a guitar, which was all it took to fill the august band box with beautiful sound. Besides being a first-ballot shoo-in for the guitar hall of fame, artist division, Thompson also is a master at the art of stagecraft. His 110 minute concert revealed him to be a generous, tenacious, and pretty funny guy. Hip to him since the days of Fairport Convention, this was my first concert, and it was awesome.
- Buy Richard Thompson music;
- Read about Richard Thompson at wikipedia.
- Listen and watch as Richard Thompson performs his classic song “Shoot Out the Lights” on his Lowden guitar and chats with Mark Segal Kemp about his approach to playing both acoustics and electrics.
And somehow, I heard Buddy Holly throughout the show. Something about that big bold acoustic sound* – the quality of the strings, the resonance of the soundboard, the spirit of the one animating the tools of his trade.
It was a sound vein mined to such great effect by Dylan until he got bored with it and veered away in 1965 at Newport to create rock ‘n roll’s first tributary – Dylan music. Meanwhile, back across the pond, Thompson and his mates formed bands with cool names such as Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and Pentangle.
… to be continued.
*That may be my entry in the redundancy tournament.
Live From Here at Tanglewood, June 15, 2019
By Dave Read – Chris Thile has the hardest job in show biz, following Garrison Keillor as host of a live radio broadcast from the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood. The show he ran June 15, 2019, was on par with the 16 editions of Keillor’s that we covered.
Just as we remember the bit from the initial show in 2000, when the pretend Bill Clinton responds to Keillor’s inquiry as to what it’s like to be leaving the house he has called home for eight years by mimicing Bob Dylan singing Like a Rolling Stone, Thile’s troupe had us rolling in the aisles with something as funny and as original – and therefore, memorable.
They created a universe in which whenever a put-upon father (Father’s Day on the horizon) responded to his teenager in an unsatisfactory way, a clip from the awesome Harry Chapin’s Cats in the Cradle would fill the air and guilt-trip dad into action!
Thile also has pre-existing Tanglewood conditions – his maternal grandfather, a composer, had a piece performed here sixty some years ago, AND he himself is a wrangler in Yo Yo Ma’s Goat Rodeo. Keillor had one too – a second date with his eventual wife when she was a student here at BUTI. The both are right up front about how much they like Tanglewood, especially that this show concludes their live radio season. And the audience seems pretty happy too.
Listen to the show.
Cellphone snaps of the lawn audience and a couple views of the stunning new Tanglewood Learning Institute up by Ozawa Hall.
Wynton Marsalis Quintet and Ellis Marsalis Quintet at Tanglewood, Sept. 2, 2018
By Dave Read – Wynton Marsalis is every bit the national treasure that Leonard Bernstein was and it seems that we in the Tanglewood orbit keep getting luckier. This was dubbed the Bernstein Centennial Summer, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra segment of it was bookended with concerts by artists representing the city of New Orleans, currently in the midst of its own Tricentennial celebration!
The opening weekend of the 2018 Tanglewood season included Harry Connick, Jr. in concert and the Sept. 1 concert by the Wynton Marsalis Quintet and Ellis Marsalis Quintet closed it in a manner that makes an already memorable season unforgettable! (Producers for the Sept. 2 show in the Shed requested no reviews so – mum’s the word!)
Somebody ought to profile those two quintessential American musicians – wouldn’t you love to read a study that compares and contrasts the lives and work of Leonard Bernstein and Wynton Marsalis? To all appearances they are utterly different, yet exactly alike as American musical artists.
Donald Hall, their late poet peer, who also performed in the Koussevitsky Music Shed (as a guest on the 2008 A Prairie Home Companion), wrote about “…poetry’s continuous assertion that opposites are identical.'” I don’t think he’d mind if we substituted ‘music’ for ‘poetry,’ in order to properly align these Tanglewood Fellows, Bernstein and Marsalis.
The quintet headed by Ellis Marsalis, father of Wynton, played a flawless opening set, almost equally divided between covers and original material. The patriarch of the first family of New Orleans musicians (son Brantford has also headlined shows here) is an impressive presence with a deft but airy touch on the piano, with a minimum of talk between pieces.
Wynton Marsalis’ deep Tanglewood roots
This was a home game for Wynton, who recalled being in the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra under the direction of Leonard Bernstein for a performance of the Prokofiev Fifth in 1979. Marsalis, while singling out Gunther Schuller and trumpter Roger Voisin, besides Bernstein, for praise, stated simply that Tanglewood changed his life. Before the concert, we heard someone talk about the 1999 program here with the BSO and Seij Ozawa plus Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra combining to perform the Peer Gynt Suite, which Duke Ellington adapted for jazz orchestra.
The concert attracted a lage Lawn audience, but a rather sparse gathering in the Shed. Perhaps Ozawa Hall was the more suitable venue for this program?
Bernstein Centennial Celebration at Tanglewood, August 26, 2018
By Dave Read – The Bernstein Centennial Celebration at Tanglewood, the culmination of the Summer of Lenny in the Berkshires, was a three hour variety show that wrapped up with the rafter-rattling Finale from Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection.” But, since it would’ve been too tidy for this event to dissolve into silence, host Audra McDonald returned and began singing Somewhere, from West Side Story, and by the time the curtain did drop, that chestnut had been made refulgent by Ms. McDonald, three operatic soloists, a dozen gang members (Jets, Sharks), a few conductors, scores of instrumentalists, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus.
Tanglewood is where Leonard Bernstein’s nonpareil career got crucial early boosts from Serge Koussevitsky and Aaron Copland in 1940, and where it ended in 1990 with his final performance, six weeks before his death. The Leonard Bernstein Office asserts that the centennial celebration includes more than 2,300 events around the world. It is such a big deal that it was the Google doodle for August 25, 2018:
Tale of two Tanglewoods
There is some irony in the realization that Highwood House, setting for Highwood’s Ghost, the piece John Williams composed for the Bernstein Centennial, serves today as a sort of dividing line in the stratification of the Tanglewood audience. It’s the Jets banding together against the Sharks; it’s Upstairs, Downstairs. One audience nestles under a canopy to nosh canapes over by Highwood House, while the other one swarms the lawn around the Shed!
The event was recorded by PBS for airing in December. We chatted with a member of the film crew, wondering if he had worked any of the televised Tanglewood shows, such as the Tanglewood 75th Anniversary Gala or Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble? That was a lucky question because it turns out he was on the crew hired in 1995 by Sony to record a Wynton Marsalis program – which many people hoped would lead to something along the lines of Leonard Bernstein’s wildly popular and successful Young People’s Concerts, which aired on CBS from 1958 until 1972.
We will add photos, video, and copy to this report, so please, stay tuned!
Bernstein’s Mass Highwood’s Ghost at Tanglewood, August, 2018
By Dave Read – The Sunday afternoon (Aug. 19) program on the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2018 Tanglewood calendar has loomed in anticipation since I filled out my summer concert list months ago, especially because of the rarity of the Bernstein selection, Three Meditations from Mass, for cello and orchestra, which has been performed at Tanglewood only once, in 1998, with Yo-Yo Ma on cello and Seiji Ozawa conducting. Excerpted from Mass, which he composed for the 1971 opening of The Kennedy Center, the Meditations for cello and orchestra was premeired there six years later, with Bernstein conducting the National Symphony and Mstislav Rostropovich on cello.
This program opened with An Outdoor Adventure by Bernstein’s original Tanglewood instructor Aaron Copland, probably second only to Serge Koussevitsky in his importance to Bernstein’s development as a musician.
John Williams celebrates Leonard Bernstein with Highwood’s Ghost
Oh Man – Koussevitsky, Copland, Bernstein… sometimes it is hard to introduce a Tanglewood article without bumping into ghosts! Nothing to be frightened about, so long as the orchestra on stage is comprised of Tanglewood Fellows, the women and men soon to matriculate from the Tanglewood Music Center into careers in the world’s leading orchestras. Fifty years from now, dozens of musicians in this orchestra will be delighting audiences in grand music halls and outdoor venues around the world. Time and mortality may be buzzkills in many settings, but they are key to the alchemy of music, our balm no matter the season – grief or joy.
Nelsons and Ma – pas de deux
For all the auditory brilliance radiating from the stage today, I’m logging a visual memory – the apparition of Andris Nelsons and Yo-Yo Ma, following both Highwood’s Ghost and the Three Meditations, each acheiving a pose in assymetrical opposition to the other, becoming perfectly still, their gazees locked until sound had vanished.
And speaking of the visual, after today, Highwood’s Ghost is my favorite John Williams film score! To hell with Hollywood, and Mammon’s other labs, a far more entertaining movie streams across the silver screen of the mind while listening to this latest addition to the Tanglewood canon.
Here are the composer’s note on Highwood’s Ghost:
“Highwood is one of the grand old houses of the Tanglewood campus, which stands today with dignity and grace as it has since 1846.
I well remember one night, as Lenny was making his way up the first stairwell, exclaiming “this place is haunted!” Coincidentally, I’m told that a number of people who worked at the house over the years have also felt Highwood to be haunted. In any case, it may be expected that Lenny, genius that he was, might have had a special ability to receive transmission from the sphere of spirits and signs.
I thought a little piece about this history might be fun, and provide the unusual combination of harp and cello an opportunity to set the stage for an ectoplasmic visit.
The music, as you may notice, is a little haunted by Lenny, but it is not suggested that he is the ghost. You’re invited to listen and make your own guess as to the identity of this seemingly very pleasant spirit… I have my own ideas.”
The program concluded with another piece particularly suited to be both a workout and a showcase for the student orchestra, Concerto for Orchestra by Bela Bartok – just as the 2012 The Leonard Bernstein Memorial Concert did, with the late Maestro Rafael Frubeck de Burgos conducting.