Tanglewood concert reviews

Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble June 24, 2012 concert review

June 24, 2012 Article by Dave Read

Yo-Yo Ma with musicians from the Silk Road Ensemble, Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood.; photo: Hilary Scott.

Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble got the BSO’s 75th anniversary season at Tanglewood off to a rousing start with a pair of concerts in Ozawa Hall June 22 and 24. Whatever Maestro Koussevitsky had in mind when he established the orchestra’s retreat and training center in the Berkshires, not even a visionary of his stature would have forseen a concert opening with a green haired gaita player wending her way through the audience.

As the musicians assembled on stage and settled into an improvisation called Wandering Winds, Christina Pato, a raven-haired Spaniard (streaked with Kelly green), strolled through the audience on the lawn playing the gaita, the bagpipe of the Galician people of Spain. She is the second Galician bagpiper I’ve seen in concert, after Carlos Nunez, who toured with the ChieftainsJimi Hendrix.

Galician bagpiper Christina Pato

Although fresh and original to all appearances, Ms. Pato is anything but a novelty act. She has a Doctorate from Rutgers and briefcase full of other academic credentials, leads her own touring band, and is a member of the Silk Road leadership council. The prominence of her role in this report is a function of my predilections; the show was so varied and full of treats that one couldv’ve focused on a dozen other elements.

Such as the finale, Turceasca, from the Romanian gypsy tradition. It allowed all 17 musicians to seem to solo simultaenously, until a duet/duel developed between Wu Tong and (oops!) Ms. Pato. Wu Tong plays the Chinese sheng with the verve and personality one remembers from Dizzy Gillespie.

Besides the role of host/MC, Yo Yo Ma was largely an ensemble player, except on Qasida, premiered on the 22nd. A Silk Road commission by Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky, from Uzbekistan, it was written for MA to play with Kayhan Kalhor on the ancient Persian kamancheh.

There were 20-30 minutes of encores, which resulted in as upbeat and cheerful an exiting audience as I’ve ever seen. They are sure to regale their friends about this event, a concert by the Silk Road Ensemble, at Ozawa Hall where Yo Yo Ma founded it in 2000. Depending on their predilections, they may focus their reports on the pipa, or the tablas, or the jang-go.

Diana Krall at Tanglewood June 23, 2012 review

June 23, 2012 performance reviewed by Dave Conlin Read

Diana Krall performing at Tanglewood, June 23, 2012; photo: Hilary Scott
Miss Diana Krall gave a bravura performance in the Shed on the opening weekend of 75th season of concerts at Tanglewood. The show featured a crackerjack combo Anthony Wilson (guitar), Robert Hurst (bass), and Karriem Riggins (drums) in support of an almost wierdly diverse setlist that visited many provinces of the jazz empire. While it wasn’t the sort of program Miss Mary Aspinwall Tappan had in mind in 1936, when she laid the family cottage (and 210 sylvan acres) on Maestro Koussevitsky (and the BSO), it was the sort we locals have become accustomed to while the BSO has become an increasingly important element of life in the Berkshires*.

Since her first Tanglewood apearance years ago, on a bill as Tony Bennett’s guest, when “show-stealing siren” could’ve been an apt description, Miss Krall has become a full-fledged star with a commanding stage presence and an easy rapport with the audience. That was especially evident during the solo portion of her two hour set when she led into several numbers with references to her parents; and talked about her 5 year old twins. (She made a surprise appearance just before their birth during husband Elvis Costello’s performance on Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz during the 2007 Tanglewood jazz Festivl).

Miss Krall’s artistry is a melding of her voice and the piano; combined with her personality and musical sensibility, tonight’s two hour concert thouroughly satisfied. Her band was equally brilliant, bass and drums blending in primarily supportive roles, but bassist Robert Hurst had some prominence, including one passage where he brought a song home with descending notes until perfect silence was made to reverberate.

Guitarist Anthony Wilson alternated between solo and support all night, as well as being Miss Krall’s go-to guy in deciding the setlist. He played several leads and riffs that excited the audience, and altogether produced the perfect complimentary sound to Miss Krall’s.

setlist: Fats Waller, Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee, Sergio Mendes, Tom Waits …

Her setlist drew from the work of Fats Waller, Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee, Sergio Mendes, Tom Waits, and Bob Dylan and included a stunning rendition of John Lennon’s Come Together. Since Quiet nights was released in 2009, Krall has performed on four continents, produced Barbra Streisand’s Love Is the Answer, contributed Simple Twist of Fate to the charity album Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International and performed on Paul McCartney’s new album, Kisses On The Bottom.

Opening the show were the Canadien duo Denzell Seymore and Devon Thompson; really tasty music, but just too much patter for an un-familiar opening act.

*We overheard a conversation – someone was bemoaning the Berkshires remoteness from the ocean or the great lakes – her interlocutor said true enough, but can’t you imagine Tanglewood as a sort of ocean where wave after wave of great music washes ashore?

James Levine’s Tanglewood debut as BSO Music Director

July 8, 2005 Tanglewood concert review by Dave Read

James Levine’s Tanglewood debut as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, July 8, 2005, was a stunning success, his tenure heralded by a majestic performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, (reprising his Symphony Hall opening last October) that was received most enthusiastically by the dressed-up audience in the Shed and by a handful of diehards huddled under trees on the damp lawn after a rainy day.

Dubbed “The Symphony of a Thousand” when Mahler performed it in 1909 in New York with an orchestra of 171 and 858 singers, there were 361 musicians onstage for thiss performance, which was just the 3rd time it has been performed at Tanglewood. In addition to the BSO, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and the American Boychoir, there were 8 soloists, sopranos Susan Neves, Deborah Voigt and Heidi Grant Murphy, mezzo-sopranos Yvonne Naef and Jane Henschel, tenor Johan Botha, baritone Eike Wilm Schulte and bass-baritone John Relyea.

With Mahler’s composition being built around the ninth century Pentacostal hymn Veni, creator spiritus and the final scene from Goethe’s Faust, this was a program that could sanctify the occasion, as well as edify (and entertain) the audience.

Once the orchestra and singers were in place, all dressed in white, Maestro Levine, wearing a tuxedo, entered to a great roar of applause, which he acknowledged with a little kiss-blowing gesture before taking his seat on the podium.

An instant later the organ rang out and the singers sent their call heavenward:

Come, Creator Spirit
visit these Thy souls,
Fill them with heavenly grace
Whom Thou hast created of Thy spirit.

Some twenty-five minutes later an off-stage brass septet blew a brilliant accentuation to the movement-closing “Glory be…” being sung and played in rapturous fashion – and thus, the Tanglewood tenure of James Levine was begun. The second movement, lasting about twice as long as the first, was testament that the opening prayer had been answered. It seemed something whole, rather than a sum of several parts; something of ineffable beauty and complexity that moved this way and that so that it was made apparent in any number of tones and hues to evoke the gamut of emotion.

One scanned the white sea of musicians and singers as the aural locus shifted, even up above the acoustical panels where soprano Heidi Grant Murphy sang the truly high notes. And one always returned to the calm black-clad figure at the center of it all, the seated maestro conducting it all with an absolute minimum of movement.

He used his left hand for little more than to turn the pages of the score and the baton he barely raised above or beyond his shoulder. Except toward the end when he laid aside the baton and used both hands, sometimes with coaxing gestures; and he was most demonstrative, almost in conversation with, first violins Malcom Lowe and Tamara Smirnova during a sublime passage just before the finale.

And so the great inter-regnum has come to a close, nearly four full years since Seiji Ozawa ended his tenure as BSO Music Director on August 4, 2001 with a performance of Richard Strauss’ Salome, Opus 54.

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Steely Dan at Tanglewood

The July 26, 2011 Steely Dan concert at Tanglewood attracted close to a capacity crowd that seemed to enjoy the rare opportunity to witness live renditions of all-time favorites such as Aja, Bodisatva, Dirty Work, My Old School, Show Biz Kids, and Reelin’ in the Years. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, calling themselves “jazz-rock ambassadors to the galaxy,” brought their Shuffle Diplomacy Twenty Eleven tour to the Berkshires, not far from Bard College, where they first teamed up in the 60s. They were accompanied by the Miles High Big Band and the Embassy Brats.

Photos of Steely Dan at Tanglewood

Photos by Mark Connolly.

More info: Tanglewood 2011 schedule.

James Taylor, Amy Grant, Vince Gill at Tanglewood

July 3 & 4, 2011 concerts reviewed by Dave Read.

Independence Day weekend 2011 is bound to be remembered as the Dawn of the New Millennium of Peace & Understanding because that was when James Taylor leapt across the cultural divide into the arms of Amy Grant and Vince Gill, in front of back-to-back sold-out audiences at Tanglewood. This was a big surprise; we don’t do country at Tanglewood.

(Photo: Scott Caltron )

They tried it Fourth of July 2006 with LeAnn Rimes – really good concert, but half-empty Shed. That experience may have factored in to the secrecy leading up to these shows and the fact that the guest performers weren’t announced until the day before the show, well after they had been sold out, even though the date had been made months earlier.

Here’s the shocking news: the two shows were seamless; there were no jolts, nothing at all abrupt in the transitions between the several numbers each of the guests did in the midst of Taylor’s concert routine. It’s all pop entertainment, people, despite the machinations of merchandisers and principalities such as the CMA and the Grammys.

Furthermore, any dissimilarity between and among songs of James Taylor, Amy Grant, and Vince Gill were washed away by the sameness of self-deprecating adulation each evinced for the other headliners on stage.

Amy Grant is a knock-out, plain and simple, wholesomely pretty appearing toward the end of the first set in sexy summer dress with shawl that got lost for the second set both nights as did her shoes! She did her 20 year old Baby Baby to everybody’s delight.

Vince Gill too looked right at home in the Koussevitsky Music Shed, wearing grey slacks and jacket with a black collarless shirt – rather metropolitan. His song Pretty Little Adriana was a highlight of his mini-sets, especially his deft, searing blues guitar playing. No wonder Gill is a regular at Eric Clapton’s Crossroads festival.

James Taylor was no less good, and effusive as always in his regard for his band with whom he worked up a fresh sampling from his ouvre for these shows. Our favorite both nights was Steamroller, delivered in about half the time but with maybe double the oomph of earlier Tanglewood performances. Two or three minutes into it, ace sideman Larry Goldings took the lead on the Hammond B3, then it segued neatly back to Walt Fowler on muted trumpet, before coming front and center for James Taylor and Vince Gill’s guitars. Very cool.

Another highlight for us was some jazzy singing by Taylor – several little riffs that were like the vocal equivalents of guitar solos. They emphasize the joy he takes in his work and make it feel as is he is truly into the current presentation of the song and bringing it to life rather than merely involved in yet another recitation of it.

We sensed that, in his patter this week, Taylor has given additional prominence to his 1968 anointing by the Beatles. As grateful as we are to him for introducing Amy and Vince to us this year, perhaps he’ll be more Beatle-esque next summer and invite to Tanglewood some mixed-up homesick youngster at the dawn of a startling career?

BSO opens 2011 Tanglewood season

The Boston Symphony’s summer residency at Tanglewood in the Berkshires got underway July 8th with a all-Italian program under the direction of guest conductor Charles Dutoit. Here is a video clip from the opening night performance, showing Angela Meade singing an excerpt from Bellini’s opera Norma.