Dave Read

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 21, 2023 performance – Today’s program featured the aptly sub-titled ninth symphony by the Czech composer Antonin Dvorák, which he wrote while on an extended visit to the New World. His time Stateside was split between NYC, where he was paid lavishly to direct the National Conservatory of Music and a town in Iowa, where a large cohort of Czech immigrants helped allay his homesickness. With Dandong, China native Xian Zhang at the podium, we Tanglewood patrons are well-reminded of the borderless nature of music! (Hilary Scott photos)

Ms. Zhang was masterful and energetic in leading the orchestra through Dvorak’s score; this is one of those rare compositions that sounds familiar, thanks to its widespread popularity, but which never sounds trite.

It should be always a happy occasion when an Aaron Copland composition is on the program at Tanglewood, which would be an alien place without the forty years he devoted to it. But, even though the performance was just lovely, the very idea of modifying anything as sacred as the collaboration between Copland and Martha Graham is a bad one.

What’s worse is the choreographer’s mistake in calling his derivative work, “Spring,” because his piece differs from the the Appalachian Spring of Copland/Graham, which he writes in the program was about life on the “American frontier.” I’m no geographer, but I know that both Appalachia and Appalachian music are nestled in the heart of America, not out on some imaginary frontier.

Boston Symphony Orchestra
Xian Zhang, conductor
Nimbus Dance
Samuel Pott, artistic director and choreographer

COPLAND Appalachian Spring
Intermission
DVOrÁK Symphony No. 9, From the New World

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 16, 2023 performance – This program played out during a lull in the rainy weather that has tried the patience of tourists and wreaked havoc with Tanglewood‘s acres of grasstop parking lots. Not only did the ticketed audience seem happy for the respite from rain, but the avian inhabitants of the grounds around the Koussevitsky Music Shed chirped their joy too.

That’s one of the best things about Tanglewood – the splendor of the Berkshires reminds us of our subordination to the reign of laws more perfect than the ones we dream up! And so we don’t begrudge sparrows and wrens from having their say.

keep politics out of music

I don’t know how anybody thinks it makes sense for any generation but his own to judge the character of a composer, but the sad fact is that Carl Orff seems destined to be blamed by posterity for not liberating Germany from Hitler.

Ludwig von Beethoven, on the other hand, had the good sense to born before the invention of radio, which is the mass media that extended the reach of politics beyond the well-read cohort to the hoi polloi, who always are putty in the hands of people like Mussolini, Hitler, and the Nixon-through-Trump machine.

Much of Beethoven’s music leads me to feel as if I’ve been returned to a primordial place, and it’s a worry-free place because politics only enters the Beethoven-sphere to remind us that the great man “undedicated” his third symphony to France’s own great tyrant, Napoleon! (see image) Today’s piece, Leonore Overture No. 3, one of the four overtures he composed for the opera Lenore, fairly sums up Beethoven’s work in the genre, which would’ve included more if things had gone his way!

Here is a link to the article we wrote about the previous performance of Carmina Burina at Tanglewood in 2009.

BSO program notes – July 16, 2023

Boston Symphony Orchestra
Andris Nelsons, conductor
Erin Morley, soprano
Reginald Mobley, countertenor
Will Liverman, baritone
Tanglewood Festival Chorus
?James Burton, conductor
Boston Children’s Chorus
?Emily Howe, conductor
?Kenneth Griffith, music director

BEETHOVEN Leonore Overture No. 3
ORFF Carmina burana

Sung in Latin with English supertitles

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 9, 2023 performance – The featured composition on the program, in the Koussevitsky Music Shed, for the first Sunday of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2023 Tanglewood tenure, the Brahms Violin Concerto in D, Opus 77, was performed brilliantly by violin soloist Hilary Hahn, artist-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Wigmore Hall in London!

This concerto by Brahms is a thrilling symphonic work with enough twists, turns, and tempo modifications to keep the mind fully engaged for the duration. (Perhaps the caesura at the end of the adagio may fool you into rustling for your car keys!)

As the concluding movement gets underway, however, there’s no room for doubt, except for how such a radiantly gowned woman could be responsible for such “fire, flash, and energy” as Steven Ledbetter describes the concerto’s finale in the program – and which ever-so-aptly describes today’s performance by Ms. Hahn.

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 4, 2023 performance – James Taylor‘s 2023 Fourth of July concert at Tanglewood, the veritable summer home to music in America for nearly a century, has come to feel, nearly fifty years after his debut here, like an annual rite of mythic popular entertainment.

Hustled, as we Americans seem to be, into states of terminal teenage dependency by the ubiquitous marketplace, we gather annually to hear James testify that recovery is available to all who fall, and that if you reach out for help, you may wind up auditioning for half the Beatles before you’re old enough to vote.

James Taylor is generous as any musician on the scene, and, in the company of the best “session” players available in LA, NY, and Nashville, every concert of his is bound to be a good one. They are usually of the “an evening with” variety – part automythology and family man, part singer/songwriter, and part rock star kickin’ out the jams.

(Fans of Elvis Costello may be interested in my take on his appearance in Bob Dylan’s Philosophy of Modern Song.)

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 1, 2023 performance – This concert in the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood could’ve been promoted as a celebration of the instrument at the beating heart of American popular music – the guitar.

And what would that music be without contributions from our cousins across the pond? Elvis Costello is an England-born Irishman who adopted the first name of one of our own kings, as well as Mr. Presley’s dedication to the audience! Costello is married to Diana Krall, the brilliant jazz musician from another former colony (now suffering massive forest fires) who has performed at Tanglewood several times. (Click any image to scroll them all; Hilary Scott photos.)

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Added to his band of Imposters for this concert was Charlie Sexton, a guitar prodigy who has been stunning audiences since his emergence as a teenager in Austin in the early 1980s, and whose impressive resume includes stints in Bob Dylan’s band. Longtime bandmate Steve Nieve was given ample opportunities to display his keyboard chops as were bassist Davey Faragher and drummer Pete Thomas.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Costello has a fervid fanbase that keeps up-to-date by way of a wiki, where you’ll find much more information, including the setlist for this show.

The opening act would be the featured act in most other circumstances – but this is Tanglewood, where one must be ready to receive more than was bargained for! Nick Lowe and Los Straitjackets, four guitarists and a drummer, opened with a rousing 45 minute set that had the force and the versatility of the guitar on full display. Lowe is a friendly and funny frontman, even if amplification makes it difficult to understand him word-by-word. This is his second consecutive appearance on the Tanglewood schedule. Now, let’s go for the threepeat!