Tanglewood concert reviews

By Dave Read, Aug. 2, 2026 performance – The Tanglewood audience was treated last weekend to two rising stars in the constellation of violin soloists, Augustan Hadelich and Himari; center stage today belonged to virtuoso Joshua Bell, who has been the delight of Tanglewood audiences since 1989.

This was a repeat of Bell’s 2011 performance of the Fantasia on Scottish folk melodies for violin by Max Bruch. It’s no wonder a musician of Bell’s stature would enjoy performing a composition that puts the full gamut of his skill and artistry on display. Also featuring on the piece was the playing of the Boston Symphony’s principal harpist, Jessica Zhou.

For an encore, the audience was treated to Mr. Bell’s improvisation on Souvenirs d’Amerique, by Henri Vieuxtemps.

Following intermission, Maestro Nelsons led the orchestra in Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 3 in B flat. Along with an introductory piece called Mamoris by Sarah Kirkland Snider, a thoroughly satisfying afternoon of musical excellence emanate from the Koussevitzky Music Shed on the stately yet bucolic campus in the Berkshires.

For Tanglewood tickets and other information, please visit the website of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Here is information on how to get to the Berkshires.

By Dave Read, Aug. 1, 2026 performance – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, sung in Italian by an amazing array of vocalists, accompanied by the brilliance of the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the baton of their beloved music director, Andris Nelsons, amounted to as grand an evening’s entertainment as could be had anywhere, anytime.

It just doesn’t get any better than this. There is no handmade or machine-made instrument or device equal to a well-trained human voice, nor is there any ensemble more dynamic and beautiful than a well-trained orchestra when conducted by a well-trained and experienced conductor. That’s what we had at in the Koussevitzky Music Shed at Tanglewood tonight, a three hour performance that nobody hoped would end a second earlier than it had to.

Although himself an original artist of the first order, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro is based on a contemporary French play, The Barber of Seville, which, decades later, would be transformed into an opera of the same name by Gioachino Rossini. As a Spanish barber imagined into existence by a French playwright, then transposed into libretti by two Italian writers and made the nuclei of Austrian and Italian operas, Figaro must be the avatar of European unity!

That is how fine art and culture works. Since there is nothing new under the sun, the fine arts are a constant flow of human expression continually refreshed and renewed down the generations. The most artists can do to reflect and improve upon whatever of life and art and they have experienced.

(That process of art and musical regurgitation was called the Folk Method when Bob Dylan began his career in Greenwich Village, breathing new life into old sea shanties, Negro spirituals, Celtic ballads, and whatever he heard at the Grand Ole Opry or on the radio.)

Even though The Marriage of Figaro is among the all-time most popular operas and the Boston Symphony Orchestra has been catering to public tastes since 1881, tonight is the first time the BSO has performed the complete opera.

I don’t know if Chad Smith is consulting anybody on how to sell-out the Shed eight weeks every summer, but I promise you that everybody in the audience tonight is a volunteer BSO booster, unless the suits keep screwing things up. Had Mozart showed up to take a bow tonight, I bet he would’ve worn a rose boutonniere.

If there was any element or aspect of tonight’s performance that stood out from all the others it would be a few soprano and or mezzo-soprano duets; stirring as each solo voice sounded, pairs of them can be other-worldly!

For a report on tonight’s concert from the perspective of a scholar, please see: Mozart’s Transformative Take on Power and Forgiveness, at The Boston Music Intelligencer.

Hanna-Elisabeth Müller, soprano (Countess)
Nikola Hillebrand, soprano (Susanna)
Eden Bartholomew, soprano (Barbarina)
Emily D’Angelo, mezzo-soprano (Cherubino)
Elizabeth Bishop, mezzo-soprano (Marcellina)
Joshua Sanders, tenor (Don Curzio)
Rodell Rosel, tenor (Don Basilio)
Joshua Hopkins, baritone (Count)
Michael Sumuel, baritone (Figaro)
Patrick Carfizzi, baritone (Doctor Bartolo)
Dean Murphy, baritone (Antonio)
Tanglewood Music Center Vocal Fellow James Darrah Black, director

By Dave Read, July 26, 2026 performance – On the Tanglewood campus in the heart of the Berkshires, Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Andris Nelson led a program of compositions by Esa-Pekka Salonen, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, with Himari soloing on the Mozart concerto, in her BSO and Tanglewood debut.

To an unschooled audience member, such as myself, Mozart’s first and fifth violin concerti, presented here Friday and today, may as well be step-siblings. The fifth appears bold and determined while the first seems pensive and dreamy. Not surprisingly, the soloists for Friday evening and this afternoon are as different in appearance as are the works they performed. (Undoubtedly, each would have been brilliant on either concerto; I simply enjoy the double contrast between the compositions and the soloists.)

Himari, born 2011 in Japan, was a poised presence whose performance was the equal of the orchestra’s in the Mozart work known for its grace and charm, as the progrm notes indicate. During an extended passage when the soloist is silent, Himari stood still, her arms at her sides and violin tucked under her right shoulder, as if waiting at the bus stop. When the score called for it, she was animated, toe-tapping, and bow-flourishing. So grows the world of music, now with another elite violinist, one who seems perfectly suited to the role.

The program began with a composition, Gambit, composed in 1998 by Esa-Pekka Salonen as an exchange of birthday gift with a fellow composer. It is an exciting piece, noted for tumbling strings, wooden percussion, mallets, and woodwinds. Salonen, curator of this year’s Festival of Contemporary Music, introduced Gambit from the stage.

As on Friday, today’s program concluded with Tchaikovesky, Symphony No. 5 in E minor. As Tanglewood itself represents the fulfillment of Serge Koussevitzky’s ambitious dream, so too the work of another Russian composer seems the fulfillment of the Berkshire’s bucolic promise. Air-light warbling birds aflutter in the dense and resonant woods.

By Dave Read, July 24, 2026 performance – On the Tanglewood campus of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, music director Andris Nelsons conducted Mozart’s Violin concerto No. 5 in A, with Augustan Hadelich as soloist, followed by Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2 in D.

Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 is an especially beautiful piece of music, which sweeps an audience away in a flood of sonorous gold. The concerto opens as if an eternal aural flame has been re-kindled, when the soloist utters an authoritative, brief credenza that will reappear several times in the half-hour life of the performance. Tonight, although the program was quintessentially classical, the presence of the virtuoso Hadelich added an element from the world of jazz, since the credenzas performed were his own improvisations on Mozart’s score.

Artist-in-residence this season with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he plays a 1744 violin by Guiseppe Guarneri del Gesu; imagine the ocean of joy that has flowed from that hand-crafted instrument over the course of nearly three hundred years. His encore was his own arrangement of Schumann’s Träumerei from Kinderszenen, Op. 15.

Maestro Nelsons and his orchestra united as a force of nature during the Tchaikovsky symphony, filling the Shed and environs with a splendor of sound. It is one of life’s simple joys to press the mental “do not disturb” button to bask and revel in wave after wave of musical sense.

By Dave Read, July 19, 2026 performance – Today’s matinee concert in the Koussevitzky Music Shed at Tanglewood by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, music director Andris Nelsons conducting, was the epitome of what a concert should be; the appearance of rose boutonnieres on stage and throughout the audience a reminder of the divided society we inhabit.

The concert opened with Symphony No. 22 in E flat, The Philosopher, composed in 1764 by Franz Jopseph Hayden, and only played once before by the BSO, fifty years ago, at Tanglewood. With only one other performance in the orchestra’s 145 year history, this is an example the programming philosophy that resulted in the Stand with Andris movement, symbolized by the red rose. Musicians such as Maestro Nelsons work in service to the Muse, not to the diverse communities that buy concert tickets. That is the misalignment that precipitated the fraught tempest in the BSO’s teapot.

Out of alignment are the Trustees, whose mission is to serve the muse-devoted artists of the orchestra, not Mammon, already well-served by the Boston Pops, as well as by the whole gamut of pop music. You can serve Mammon or you can serve the Muse, but you cannot do both things at once.

Maestro Nelsons is a compelling visual presence; his movements on the podium make it seem as if the score uncoils from him during the performance. The first thing we noticed during his initial Tanglewood performances 13 years ago was how often he reached back to the podium during performances. He was setting roots in the Shed, but not deep enough, it seems, to withstand uprooting by the bean counters in Boston.

The interplay between two virtuosos, pianist Danill Trifonov and BSO trumpeter Thomas Rolfs made the Shostokovich concerto especially entertaining. That such disparate objects as the piano and the trumpet can so contrast and compliment one another lays at the innate joy of symphonic music.

To conclude the program with Beethoven’s life-affirming second symphony, as may have been said before, is procisely why places like Tanglewood exist.