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
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