Tanglewood concert reviews

Harry Connick, Jr. at Tanglewood June 23, 2018

Article updated June 25, 2018 by Dave Read

Harry Connick, Jr. transported the Tanglewood audience Saturday night from the high land overlooking Lake Mahkeenac to the Ninth Ward below Lake Pontchartrain by way of a concert/seminar of nearly two and a half hours that included a second-line parade through the Koussevitsky Music Shed.

Is it a coincidence that America’s sole contribution to the world of art – jazz, encompassing the blues (or vice versa) has its origins in the capital of the slave trade, America’s original sin? Probably not, since the two are inextricably linked; my guess is that one is compensation for the other, as if the beauty and transcendent power of jazz is how the universe seeks atonement for the horrors of slavery.

We Tanglewood patrons are likely to know as much about life in Latvia as we do about life in New Orleans; thanks to the musicianship and generosity of Mr. Connick and his band, we’ve gotten a taste of life in the Big Easy, without having to pay the dues required to make a living there. Perhaps most poignant tonight was Mr. Connick’s show-and-tell tribute to his childhood piano teacher James Booker, who got the gig thanks to the unconventional administration of justice by the District Attorney, Harry Connick, Sr.! After showing us how Booker taught him the rudiments of “stride” piano playing, he played a wistful Hear Me in the Harmony in tribute.

Other highlights from this show included solos and duets by Johnathan DuBose, Jr. on guitar, Arthur Lantin on drums, Lucien Barbain on trombone, and an amazing display of tap dancing by Mike Hawkins. Allen Touissaint‘s infectious Yes We Can Can was a party. An over-introduced Gospel segment preceded the band’s foray into the audience, for chorus after chorus of When the Saints Go Marching In, with umbrellas waving in genuine second-line fashion.

Wynton Marsalis and Louis Armstrong in the Berkshires

Harry Connick, Jr. spent a summer honing his classical chops here as a teenager, as did fellow New Orleanian Wynton Marsalis (Tanglewood Music Center Fellow 1979). Another denizen of the Crescent City, Louis Armstrong, held forth just down the road during Folk and Jazz Roundtables hosted by Stephanie and Phil Barber, which led to the brief but critically important Lenox School of Jazz – the first of its kind in the world.

[James Booker photo credit: By Lionel decoster – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link]

2018 Tanglewood schedule

The 2018 Tanglewood schedulefeatures a season-long celebration of the centennial of Leonard’s Bernstein’s birth, culminating in the Aug. 25 Bernstein Centennial Celebration hosted by Audra McDonald, with Maestro Andris Nelsons, four guest conductors and soloists Yo-Yo Ma, Midori, and others.

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Tanglewood tickets and box office information

Tickets for the 2018 Tanglewood season available through Tanglewood’s website, www.tanglewood.org, SymphonyCharge at 888-266-1200, and at the Symphony Hall Box Office at 301 Massachusetts Avenue, Boston MA.

Getting around the Tanglewood campus

The Tanglewood campus, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Tanglewood Music Center comprises several hundred acres in the towns of Lenox and Stockbridge. It is the location of the Koussevitsky Music Shed and Ozawa Hall, where hundreds of thousands attend concerts and a variety of events, including picnics. We always advise new visitors to arrive early and take their daily walking exercise wandering the beautiful Tanglewood grounds. This dynamic map of the Tanglewood grounds includes photos and information for such points of interest as Aaron Copland Library, Highwood Manor House, The Glass House, and The Lion’s Gate.

Steven Stills and Judy Collins at Tanglewood June 17, 2018

Article updated June 20, 2018 by Dave Read

Tanglewood schedules present an embarrassment of riches, putting us at risk of fun-overload, which is as dangerous as second-helpings of pecan pie at Thanksgiving. Having covered Tanglewood since the Clinton Administration, we know enough to moderate, not overbook, and to look closely at the lineup so as to avoid regret.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra has listed 15 concerts on the 2018 Popular Artist calendar before Maestro Andris Nelsons opens the BSO’s Tanglewood season on July 6. The first weekend included Roger Daltry and the Boston Pops performing The Who’s Tommy, followed by a show billed as David Crosby and Friends, and then Steven Stills and Judy Collins for Sunday afternoon.

Underwhelmed by last summer’s Pete Townsend/Boston Pops mashup, we eliminated this year’s Who remnant, leaving us to decide between factions of Crosby, Stills, and Nash. We chose the show scheduled for Sunday largely because Tanglewood is the most beautiful music venue in the world on a Sunday in June, but also because we figured Stills’ guitar chops will have aged better than Crosby’s front-man chops.

We were so right about the Sunday afternoon at Tanglewood aspect of our choice, but from what we hear, we missed a pretty exciting show Saturday night!

2018 Tanglewood schedule

Hotels near Tanglewood

Tanglewood tickets and box office information

Getting around the Tanglewood campus

Alison Krauss at Tanglewood June 19, 2018

Article updated June 20, 2018 by Dave Read

The original iteration of the Berkshires as a playground for the obscenely rich was during the last quarter of the 19th century, when it became an autumnal retreat for robber barons and other scallywags who’d grown bored of their Newport and Adirondack estates. In terms of man-made seasons, that was it – the Berkshires’ season was late summer/early fall. The Berkshires today, its essential natural resource polluted in perpetuity by G.E. (the corporate criminal kicked off the Dow Jones just this week), scrambles to make a go of things by converting the arts into a commodity.

One hopes this conversion is less harmful than GE’s conversion of the Housatonic River was. But one bit of harm is the spawning of the awkward phrase “shoulder season.” It seems that where a segment of the local population that otherwise would’ve been engaged in corporate communications and other aspects of internal paper-pushing now toil in the obscenely oxymoronic “cultural economy.” As one who traffics in language, I cannot help but wonder if a segment of a shoulder season would be called a “clavical week?”

…on the shoulders of giants

That’s why metaphor is best left alone by people essentially talking business, because if we imagine Tanglewood as something with shoulders, then we see something hideously ugly – one shoulder comprised of fifteen concerts, the other only one. We know PCBs to be endocrine-disrupting, so we’ll have to find somebody else than GE to blame for this skeletal anomaly.

There’s no more beautiful venue in the world than Tanglewood, regardless the season – or metaphor. And speaking of beautiful, Alison Krauss, accompanied by remnats of Union Station and members of the Cox family, regaled a handsome audience on a quintessential June evening with a ninety minute show that amounted to a sampler of her stunning career.

2018 Tanglewood schedule

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Getting around the Tanglewood campus

Beethoven’s Ninth closes 2017 Tanglewood season

August 28, 2017 Tanglewood concert review by Dave Read

The honeymoon between Music Director Andris Nelsons, born 1978, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, born 1881, is over; their marriage was on full display for the 2017 season finale at Tanglewood, where they produced as beautiful performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 as you could imagine. With four soloists, and the estimable Tanglewood Festival Chorus, with new conductor James Burton, the Koussevitsky Music Shed, and the enormous audience, combined to become the locus of the music world, for one splendid late summer afternoon in the Berkshires, where autumn alone is sufficient to follow a summer of such splendid sounds.

During the moment between movements, Maestro Nelsons stood still, his hands on the podium, as if connected to a charging station. After all, he is the only one of the 200+ musicians on stage with a role on every note in the hour-long composition. In that vein, the TFC deserve extra plaudits for their impossible stillness the forty plus minutes they are in place, but not singing. This marvelous musical tableau is completed by them.

Under Nelsons’ direction, today’s performance, perhaps the fifteenth time we’ve heard the BSO play Beethoven’s Ninth at Tanglewood, filled out the character we’d perceived when contemplating the great composer. It lifted some feeling that Beethoven hadn’t attained the full measure of satisfaction owed a hard working man. Now, I can imagine the joy he felt upon first hearing its performance.

Housatonic at Stockbridge, Charles Ives

The Housatonic at Stockbridge from Three Places in New England by Charles Ives was a sublime five minute meditative sketch made especially poignant because it depicts a locale on the sinuous river a few miles away as the composer felt on his honeymoon there. The conductor looked like an angler patiently working a fly under an overhang, while a light drizzle resolved in a thunderstorm.

Aug. 27, 2017 Sunday, 2:30pm

Koussevitzky Music Shed – Tanglewood, Lenox, MA

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Boston Symphony Orchestra
Andris Nelsons, conductor
Katie Van Kooten, soprano
Tamara Mumford, mezzo-soprano
Russell Thomas, tenor
John Relyea, bass-baritone
Tanglewood Festival Chorus
James Burton, conductor

IVES “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” from Three Places in New England
BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 9 (65 min)

Tanglewood tickets, : box office info.

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Tanglewood Takes Flight with Mass Audubon at Pleasant Valley Wildlife Sanctuary

August 2016 Tanglewood program review by Dave Read

Tanglewood Takes Flight; Celebration of Birds and Music with Mass Audubon at Pleasant Valley Wildlife Sanctuary is a collaboration between two organizations that span the town of Lenox, a novel merging of their missions. The program is a most obvious idea to anyone who has attended concerts at Tanglewood, where birds are likely to sit in with the house band. We attended “Program lll” Saturday at 7 a.m. with Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Piano Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center performing these piecs from Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux: Le Chopard des Alpes, Le Loriot, La Buse varible, and Le Merle bleu.

Yellow warblers and red-eyed vireos

Immediately afterwards the audience was assigned to groups for hikes in the sanctuary, led by bird experts. Our guide, Walt Peterson, called out a yellow warbler, to everyone’s amazement and, among many other deeds of ornithological wizadry, he identified the song or the red-eyed vireo, to my delight because it seems to be the song I hear everytime I hike hereabouts.

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Tanglewood on Parade 2017

August 2, 2016 Tanglewood concert review by Dave Read

Tanglewood on Parade is one of those events that qualifies as the coolest thing in the world, an event you’d make a point of attending, if you knew enough to. It is an all-day celebration of all things classically musical, in a variety of venues spread amid the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s million-acre campus in the Berkshires. You could catch two full symphonic concerts plus several recitals, while picnicking in the company of true picnic hobbyists, all on the same nickel.

Tchaikovsky’s simple and triumphant 1812 Overture caps the Gala Concert – the lithe Keith Lockhart conducting a massive ensemble combining the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Pops, including live mortar rounds while the Overture climaxes, followed by a twenty minute fireworks display over nearby Stockbridge Bowl.

Even the musically challenged, people who don’t know an allegro from a concertante, can witness it once, then again annually for a decade or more and still retain his utter naivete. The place hath charms that soothe even the rustic’s breast.

Tanglewood on Parade Concert Program

Tuesday, August 1, at 8pm
THE GREGORY E. BULGER FOUNDATION CONCERT
BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
TANGLEWOOD MUSIC CENTER ORCHESTRA
BOSTON POPS ORCHESTRA
CHARLES DUTOIT, MORITZ GNANN, KEITH LOCKHART,
KEN-DAVID MASUR, BRAMWELL TOVEY, and
JOHN WILLIAMS, conductors
GARRICK OHLSSON, piano
DAWN UPSHAW, soprano

COPLAND Fanfare for the Common Man
FELLOWS OF THE TANGLEWOOD MUSIC CENTER,
KEN-DAVID MASUR conducting

COPLAND Concerto for Piano and Orchestra
Andante sostenuto—
Molto moderato—Allegro assai
GARRICK OHLSSON, piano
TANGLEWOOD MUSIC CENTER ORCHESTRA,
BRAMWELL TOVEY conducting

KODÁLY Suite from Háry János
Prelude. The Fairy Tale Begins Viennese Musical Clock Song
The Battle and Defeat of Napoleon
Intermezzo
Entrance of the Emperor and his Court
TANGLEWOOD MUSIC CENTER ORCHESTRA,
CHARLES DUTOIT conducting

INTERMISSION

MENDELSSOHN Overture, The Hebrides (Fingal’s Cave), Opus 26
BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA,
MORITZ GNANN conducting

GERSHWIN / KERN (arr. Nelson Riddle)
“Love is Here to Stay”
“I Won’t Dance”
DAWN UPSHAW, soprano
BOSTON POPS ORCHESTRA
KEITH LOCKHART conducting

John WILLIAMS Scherzo for Motorcycle and Orchestra from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
A New Beginning from Minority Report
Throne Room & Finale from Star Wars
BOSTON POPS ORCHESTRA
JOHN WILLIAMS conducting

TCHAIKOVSKY 1812 Overture, Opus 49
TMC ORCHESTRA and
BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
KEITH LOCKHART conducting