Tanglewood concert reviews

James Taylor at Tanglewood July 4, 2014

As if the ghost of Paul Revere had gotten loose, with a mind to make mischief in the Berkshires, in the days and hours leading up to James Taylor’s 4th of July concert at Tanglewood, a quiet rumor rose to a dull roar that a British(er) were coming – to wit, Sir Paul McCartney would make a special guest appearance.

That would be a reunion of the former Beatle and the first artist signed to the beatles’ Apple records. The anicipation built and built during the concert, as Taylor made 3 or 4 references to his lucky days in London, where he auditioned for McCartney and George Harrison while the Beatles were at work on the White Album. In fact, he began the show with the very audition song Something in the Way She Moves! But it never happened, and I don’t think anybody was disappointed. (McCartney did made an appearance, via video, at Taylor’s 60th birthday celebration here six years ago.)

It was another sold-out Tanglewood gig for Taylor, who appeared fit as a fiddle after taking last year off from touring to concentrate on the latter part of the singer-songwriter job description. He performed one new song tonight that’ll appear on an album eventually – Today, Today, Today. The balance of his typically generous setlist was familiar, including: Handy Man, Fire and Rain, Up on the Roof, Sweet Baby James, You’ve Got a Friend, Buddy Holly’s Everyday. Over the course of the nearly three hour show (including encores), everybody in the band and vocal quartet got the spotlight. Michael Landau, Luis Conte, Walt Fowler, Andrea Zonn, Kate Markowitz, Arnold McCuller, David Lasley, Larry Goldings, Steve Gadd, Lou Marini, Jimmy Johnson. His wife Kim and son Henry joined the vocalists for a couple numbers, too.

Monty Alexander Trio at Tanglewood

August 25, 2004 performance; by Dave Read

Monty Alexander peered out from the Ozawa Hall stage at Tanglewood, saw the auditorium half full, and proceeded to deliver a concert of upbeat and optimistic music to an enthusiastic audience that occupied way less than half the hall. Such is the nature of the Jamaican-born pianist, whose reputation apparently carries insufficient weight in the Tanglewood market, despite a fifty year career, more than 60 albums as a leader, and performance credits with legends of jazz including Dizzy Gillespie, Frank Sinatra, Benny Golson, and Oscar Peterson.

The concert began with a piece that quoted I Got Rhythm, begun by drummer Dennis Mackrel (Obed Calvaire was listed in the program) and bassist Hassan Shakur before Alexander made his entrance. A few minutes later, his composition Look Up seemed to be running alongside the A Train, and the next tune, Just Wait, was written in response to a successful bout with cancer.

Mr. Alexander evinced an easy rapport with the audience, even if he did seem to value his early experience with Sinatra more highly than today’s jazz fan would. And he was as generous with his sidemen as any leader could be. He stood aside while Shakur took a long ambling solo that somehow encountered The Pink Panther along the way. Other familiar tunes heard tonight were Come Fly With Me, Day O, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and Sweet Georgia Brown.

The BSO was bolder than usual during the 2013 Tanglewood season with its “Popular Artist” programming. Tonight’s program had all the requisite merit on the artistic side, but as with a few earlier events, the marketing effort wasn’t up to par. That is unfortunate because, just as a full house can raise the level of excitement, a nearly empty one can be an un unhappy distraction.

Beethoven’s Ninth closes BSO’s 2013 Tanglewood season

August 25, 2013 performance; by Dave Read

There is an appealing symmetry in the scheduling of Beethoven’s Ninth at Tanglewood; it is the composition chosen 76 years ago by founding maestro Serge Koussevitsky to open the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer sojourn in the Berkshires and now it is almost always* played on the closing program. (*Former music director James Levine opened the 2006 Tanglewood season with Beethoven’s Ninth.)

For today’s concert, with BSO Conductor Emeritus Bernard Haitink leading the BSO, Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and soprano Erin Wall, mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford, tenor Joseph Kaiser, and bass-baritone John Relyea, a capacity audience filled the Koussevitsky Music Shed and seven or eight thousand more convened on the Lawn, all on a day when the weather was the sort that makes even the most sullen among us see the sunny side of things.

The performance of Maestro Haitink seemed flawless, as if he were at the pre-emeritus peak of his long career. He commanded the 200+ musicians arrayed before him with an economy of action that nonetheless elicited a banquet of beautiful music. He showed that fury can be conveyed without frenzy.

Today’s performance thwarted my most determined attempt at entering a thought-less state, so that I might simply go with what flows from the stage. The first idea that trotted along was that a setting such as this, the bucolic Berkshires on a splendid summer afternoon, must’ve been put before us so that we could access a tangible, visual analog to these sounds that are rustling our souls. And that was enough to make me quit jotting mental notes. For the balance of today’s 71 minute celebration, I was delighted merely to be marked present. The ovations that followed were joyous and prolonged and included the musicians’ foot stomping salute to Maestro Haitnik.

Yo Yo Ma’s Goat Rodeo Show at Tanglewood

August 15, 2013 performance by Dave Read

If Tanglewood were simply Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, its Tanglewood Music Center and eight or nine weeks of classical music performed by the BSO and their various guest soloists and conductors, we Berkshires locals would have plenty to be grateful for. But it is so much more, for so many reasons, not least of which is that Yo Yo Ma claims it as a sort of home for his seemingly boundless musical explorations. Incidentally, he also has an actual home in the Berkshires. (Goat Rodeo Show at Tanglewood photo: Hilary Scott).

His latest musical trip led to the Goat Rodeo Sessions, the 2011 album he recorded with bsssist Edgar Meyer, fiddler Stuart Duncan, and mandolinist Chris Thile, which won Grammys for Best Folk and Best Engineered non-classical. Both the album and tonight’s show featured singer Aoife O’Donovan, of Crooked Still and Sometymes Why. She reprised No One But You, Here and Heaven, from the album and added a stunning rendition of Bob Dylan’s Farewell, Angelina.

Everybody but Mr. Ma took turns on other instruments; Meyer played piano on Franz and the Eagle, and No One But You; Thile, whose singing blended nicely with Ms. O’Donovan’s, also played fiddle and guitar; Duncan also played banjo. Except that Ma seemed to indicate that Meyer is musical director, the impression from the audience is that these are four musicians equally expert in their own domains and equally excited to be making music with peers, just for the fun of it.

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2019 Tanglewood schedule

The Boston Symphony Orchestra has released the schedule for the 2019 season at Tanglewood, which will be remembered for the opening of the Tanglewood Learning Institute, the four buildings overlooking Seiji Ozawa Hall on the Leonard Bernstein camopus.

Music director Andris Nelsons will be present for the month of July, conducting 13 programs, including the world premiere of a new work by Kevin Puts, The Brightness of Light, based on letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz on July 20, and a concert performance of Wagner’s complete Die Walküre on july 27 and 28.

2013 Tanglewood on Parade

August, 2013 performance; by Dave Read

We arrived at Tanglewood on Parade in time for the 8pm round of brass fanfares, which preceded the gala concert in the Shed. At 2pm, brass fanfares at the Main Gate heralded the beginning of an all-day celebration featuring performances throughout the Tanglewood campus by Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center, Boston University Tanglewood Institute students, and members of the BSO.

3 orchestras and 4 conductors

The gala concert included the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Boston Pops, and Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra and four conductors. Charles Dutoit led the TMCO in Borodin’s Polovetsian Dances from Prince Igor, followed by the BSO, under the baton of Stephane Deneve, playing Gershwin’s An American in Paris. After intermission, Laureate Conductor John Williams led the Pops in his own The Cowboys Overture, then current Pops conductor Keith Lockhart led them in Bernstein’s Love Theme and Finale from On the Waterfront, and then conducted a concertino on Bond Themes with the Boston Cello Quartet.

1812 Overture w/o cannon

As always, Tanglewood on Parade was brought to a close with a fiery reading of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Missing this year, alas, were the field artillery on the lawn, which always added an extra dimension to the excitement when an earth-rattling fussilade was cued by the conductor onstage. Traditionally, Eastover Resort, whose founder was a collector of Civil War memorabilia, would loan a battery of about 8 artillery pieces to Tanglewood for the day. But after a recent change in ownership and sale of the cannon, maybe it’s time to check on the whereabouts of the Civil War cannon presented to Seiji Ozawa on the occasion of his last Tanglewood on Parade in 2001 as BSO music director?

Esperanza Spalding at Tanglewood

August 4, 2013 performance; by Dave Read

Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood was transformed Sunday evening into Ms. Esperanza Spalding‘s neighborhood; she is the phenom, who at age 4 made up her mind to have a life in music while watching Yo Yo Ma perform on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. A year later she had taught herself how to play violin; by 20, she was on the faculty of the Berklee College of Music; and in 2011 she won the Best New Artist Grammy, the first time it was awarded to a jazz musician.

Tonight, her neighborhood was the locale for a session of the Radio Music Society, comprised of a crackerjack 11-piece band, which takes its name from her 2012 double-Grammy release. The horn section was set up behind music stands covered by a giant radio facade. Ms. Spalding made her entrance a few moments after the band had begun laying down the hypnotic beat of Radio Song. A little later, she implored our indulgence while she got a few things off her mind, relating to “friends. family, loved ones…”. For most in the near-capacity audience, it was easy to assent to her wish, if not an outright privlege to attend to her artistry.

Going back and forth between upright acoustic bass and electric bass guitar, Ms. Spalding occupied a musical space that could evoke a range of progenitors from Willie Dixon, to Jack Bruce, to Ron Carter. And her singing is just as impressive and various, if not peerless. For an encore, she cut loose with some terrific scat in duet with pianist Leo Genovese, promising us that it would be an improvement over the previous night’s effort at the Newport Jazz Festival.

Over the course of nearly 2 hours, we were treated to an abundance of jazz that was so contextualized that if you zoomed in to a small fragment, it was indistinguishable from mainstream jazz, but when you relaxed and took the long view, the music was the dominant fragment of a larger work, and any number of sub-genres could be identified, from hip hop, to blues, to opera.

Yes indeed opera! A case could be made that opera is the most appropriate milieu for Esperanza Spalding. Besides her duly noted accomplishments as bassist, composer, and vocalist, she evinces a perfectly entertaining knack for story and drama – a sort of sturm und drang marked by a wink and a smile.

Radio Music Society followed Ms. Spalding’s Chamber Music Society, and after tonight’s performance, the last in the US, we’re left in eager anticipation of her next venture. Besides entertaining and delighting audiences, it’s probably a good bet also that she inspires young would-be musicians, because she exudes the same joy in performance as Yo Yo Ma does. How’s this for a coincidence? Mr. Ma was the featured soloist at this afternoon’s Boston Symphony Orchestra concert next-stage over in the Koussevitsky Music Shed!