Tanglewood concert reviews

By Dave Read, June 30, 2026 performance – If classical music resides within impermeable bounds, pop music lives inside a porous membrane that allows for one genre to blend with another, so that an audience may enjoy musical mulligatawny. Who knows where, why, or how such marriages are made, but the middle-of-the -road Boston Pops Orchestra now regularly shares the stage with the far-from-mainstream music of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead.

Not a few audience members danced in their seats, since heightened vigilance makes the aisles no-dance zones, inconceivable when America was run as a republic, by the people. The Shed was full and the late afternoon rain seemingly had no deleterious effect on the crowded law.

Even though I left my critical glasses home in favor of my summertime shades, I’m reminded of what Neil Young said to the acoustic engineer who was adjusting the balance on the massive speakers installed on his porch and open barn: “more barn!” I think added prominence to the orchestra would have enhanced tonight’s concert, which was plenty fun even so, even if dancers at their seats make better doors than windows!

By Dave Read, June 26, 2026 performance – Two weeks before the downbeat of the first Boston Symphony Orchestra program of the 2026 season at Tanglewood, 1979 Tanglewood fellow Wynton Marsalis led the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra through a program in the Koussevitzky Music Shed.

The concert was excellent as expected, but surprisingly brief, ending 65 minutes after it began. Maestro Marsalis introduced the concluding number just as a response to the show was beginning to unfold in my mind.

In retrospect, the program felt more like introductory recital than a concert. Each number flowed to its own end, with titles and solos called out, which made it feel serial, adding up to a sum, but not an organic whole, as jazz concerts do. Perhaps this show reflects the state of jazz, in the aftermath of a brighter time, when jazz was available all day long somewhere on FM radio, announced by well-informed deejays, who would also tell of dozens of gigs upcoming throughout the region.

Every part of every tune played tonight sounded as full and bright as could be, yet we expected something more. Earlier performances by Mr. Marsalis, leading various bands and combos, have always left us wanting more.

By Dave Read, June 21, 2026 performance – Tanglewood’s beautiful and versatile Ozawa Hall proved a fair haven for devotees of Yacht Rock, an unabashed nostalgia for a time not long ago, but which now feels like an ancient age.

My pop music memory reaches all the way to a time when church and civic halls hosted weekend dances for high school kids, with local bands blasting out covers of the latest hits heard over and over on the radio and American Bandstand. With such quaint things as free radio and TV relics of the ancient age, the Yacht Rock revue carries delicious youthfulness to patrons long since gone from high school.

Whereas the bands at my teenage dances had scant time to hone their chops and learn the new hit songs, the musicians who comprise the nearly twenty year old Yacht Rock Revue have their sets down pat and transition with seamless ease through ABBA, Steely Dan, Hall & Oates, Toto, Jackson Browne, Fleetwood Mac, and dozens more. And instead of sporting letter sweaters, the varsity in attendance today wore captain’s hats!

By Dave Read, August 31, 2025 performance – The 2025 season of music at Tanglewood wound up the day before Labor Day, with Bonnie Raitt headlining a bill that included Jimmy Vaughn with his Tilt-a-Whirl Band. For someone who fell into the Blues bag as a college kid in Boston, around the same time Ms. Raitt began her Blues apprenticeship across the Charles River in Cambridge, this was a nice way to close the season.

Because fickle fate never takes a day off, the incompetence of traffic cops had us stuck in jam for nearly an hour, costing us all but twenty minutes of Jimmy Vaughn’s opening set. The loss is more sorely felt because that twenty minutes is on par with any twenty minutes ever spent at the Blues trough.

For all the majestic beauty of the guitar when played by musicians as great as Vaughn and Raitt, twenty minutes within earshot Jimmy Vaughn and the Tilt-a-Whirl Band will make you wonder why every guitar slinger doesn’t buttress the manipulation of guitar strings with a dollop of ballsy brass!

The piece he ended his set with reminded me of a concerto, the guitar in conversation with the brass section, such is the way one perceives musical performance, in the aftermath of an eight week series of symphony concerts!

One of the most attractive features of the blues is that, as a discrete genre, it is as firmly rooted in tradition as it is determined to propel the tradition into the future. The way that happens is on the stage through performance, not in the studio or via digital editing.

Cover and tribute bands do the opposite because their audience are on nostalgia trips, and want only to hear tunes played exactly the way they were back in the day. They ain’t interested in progress, they’re regressive, like republicans.

By way of an encore, Ms. Raitt called her colleagues back to the stage for a tasty jam session, which worked such magic on me that I forgave the knuckleheads responsible for the traffic jam on the way home. Can’t wait to see who our friends at the BSO bring into the Shed next summer. Bonnie Raitt’s band included Duke Levine, guitar, vocals, James “Hutch” Hutchinson, bass, Ricky Fataar, drums, and Glenn Patscha, keyboard, vocals. Accompanying Jimmie Vaughan were Billy Pitman, Rhythm Guitar, Jason Corbiere, Drums, Billy Horton, Bass/Vox, and the Texas Horns: Al Gomez, Trumpet, Kaz Kazanoff, Tenor Sax, John Mills, Baritone Sax.

By Dave Read, August 30, 2025 performance – All I knew about Lynyrd Skynyrd, besides the unavoidable party anthems Freebird and Sweet Home Alabama, was that the musical wizard Al Kooper had “discovered” them. Anybody audacious enough to insinuate himself into Bob Dylan’s career, and play a key role in shaping the greatest song in rock n’ roll history – Like a Rolling Stone, is somebody I’m going to pay attention to.

Here is Al Kooper describing how he “discovered” Lynyrd Skynyrd.

And so, I was excited to attend my first Lynyrd Skynyrd show, even if none of the musicians Kooper produced are alive. It was fun enough to hear their renditions of the two anthems, but it was sad to hear them do their other big hit, What’s My Name, and sad to see the audience so eager to boogie along. The song is an anthem to people who like ’em young, like Jeffrey Epstein, Matt Gaetz, and the ogre from MarALago.

By Dave Read, August 14, 2025 performance – Tonight’s concert was the sort of program Ozawa Hall was designed to accommodate at Tanglewood, which is to say amplify and transmit into the countryside, for a further blending of human voices with the natural setting that enfolds them.

The Sixteen are a choral ensemble founded in 1979 by Harry Christophers, who conducted tonight’s performance. The choral group includes six sopranos, and four each of alto, tenor, and bass.

No less a span of seventeen centuries is represented in tonight’s repertoire, which consisted of lyrics and music composed by Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), Arvo Part (b. 1935), William Byrd (1540-1623), and St. Patrick (372-466).

At the risk of seeming profane, one needn’t be a subscriber to any of the represented religious sects in order to be delighted by tonight’s concert. Love of music would suffice; special devotion to the music of artfully-trained voices is rewarded especially.

Except to the adept, the program wouldn’t appear to be very dynamic, nor even captivating – but, that is exactly what it was. From the first note to the last, The Sixteen and Maestro Christophers commanded the audience’s rapt attention. And certain pieces required certain placement of singers; that alone shows a fascinating aspect of choral music.

My own attention was such that I thought I could discern individual, discrete voices, even as they weave themselves into a single, rich tarton of delicate tone. It’s neat that ten days after this evening of choral art, Tanglewood presents the annual choral-orchestral extravaganza, Beethoven’s Ninth, and so transports us from the sublime to the spectacular.