Dave Read

By Dave Read, July 19, 2025 performance – Tonight’s performance of an opera in three acts, Tosca, by Giacomo Puccini, was as riveting and satisfying an experience as I’ve ever had at a concert. It was performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and leading vocalists from the world of opera, under the direction of music director Andris Nelsons, with James Burton conducting the Tanglewood Festival Chorus (TFC) and students from Boston University’s Tanglewood Institute (BUTI).

Whether it’s a genetic flaw or environmental damage, I don’t know, but the “drama” at the core of opera, movies, and TV shows never has been of more than secondary interest to me. When I do attend (or view on screen), I’m in for the spectacle, for the sights and sounds. Whatever literal sense the story means to convey is OK with me, so long as it delights the eyes and ears. That tonight’s was a rare treat for the audience is underscored by the fact that tonight was only the second performance in the orchestra’s 144 year history!

The principle operatic roles were played by soprano Kristine Opolais as Tosca, baritone Bryn Terfel as Scarpia, and tenor SoekJong Baek as Cavaradossi. Even though I couldn’t help but follow along with the supertitles, for all intents and purposes, I had no idea what these artists were so exercised about, but I believed every perfectly sounded syllable they produced. Even though I knew Scarpia was the bad guy, he sounded exactly like the kind of guy you want running the country.

As electrifying as was the finale of the opera, I was nearly overwhelmed by the final several minutes of Act 1, which included the TFC and BUTI, who had seemingly infiltrated the orchestra. Whether or not joy is an apt description for the action on stage as Act 1 draws to a close, the combination of the vocal soloists, the chorus, and the orchestra produced as joyful a noise as can be imagined. Or at least a sufficient amount to tide us over until we have our annual season finale of Beethoven’s Ninth next month!

By Dave Read, July 13, 2025 performance – The Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted today by Thomas Ades, substituting for Esa Pekka-Salonen, performed a program highlighted by the Sibelius Violin concerto in D minor, Opus 47, with soloist Pekka Kuusisto. Tumblebird Contrails composed by Gabriella Smith opened the program, which concluded with the Sibelius Symphony no. 5 in E-flat cl;osed it.

The concert hall, during a performance by a symphony orchestra, becomes a place where the dividing distinctions of verbal language will vaporize and disappear, if we are able to stem the flow of words between our ears. Then, the universal language of music can flood in, and have its way with us.

Despite many such visits to concert halls, the composer’s art baffles me – I’m as mystified by the vocabulary, grammar, and diction of musical composition as I am by telekinesis. But I know what I like, and there’s not much, in musical or verbal language, that I like more than the Sibelius Violin concerto in D minor, Opus 47.

There’s an equality in excellence, or, at least a disinclination to impose a dividing hierarchy on favorite compositions. But what’s the harm in speculation? If told my ears would fall off in twenty minutes, I’d cue up the final movement of this piece. There’s something brutally honest about it; it’s music at its most basic, melody imposed on rhythm – and though it holds together as a bar of bullion does, every second brings more new sounds.

So passes another summer Sunday at Tanglewood, the magical place named by one of America’s first verbal artists, Nathaniel Hawthorne. What was an unhappy term of exile for him has grown into the veritable haven of harmony for multitudes seeking temporary refuge from the cacophony of our upheaved political reality.

By Dave Read, July 11, 2025 performance – And now for something entirely different! Romeo and Juliet: A Theatrical Concert for Orchestra was on the bill tonight at Tanglewood’s Koussevitsky Music Shed, where the enthusiastic reaction from the audience indicates it was a big hit. BSO music director Andris Nelsons conducted the orchestra, Bill Barclay adapted and directed the theatrics.

At the core of the program was Romeo & Juliet, Opus 64, a ballet composed by Sergei Prokofiev, during the years when Stalin interfered with the arts in Russia the way a fugitive from justice does here.

This was amusing, light entertainment; with Shakespeare’s text reduced to the essential action of the doomed love story. Most of the best-known lines were kept, but heard only with some difficulty, partly due to acoustics but mostly because the actors employed a more conversational tone than a declamatory one, which I feel would have suited the setting better.

The theatrical part, itself, was a component of the very big, bright, orchestral conversation. I would think, therefore, that the spoken, textual parts should be leaned into as if they were instrumental solos – so that it plays like a theatrical concerto.

The program notes mention that the unhappy ending of Shakespeare’s play made it unacceptable to the dictates of “Soviet Realism,” where every ending must be a happy one. Informed the censors wouldn’t approve the Bard’s scenario, a determined Prokofiev responded by having Romeo appear a minute before Juliet’s demise, saying “Living people can dance, but the dead cannot dance lying down.”

Although we’re living under another terrible reign, one unfazed by death, whether in Gaza, Ukraine, or Texas, neither lover died tonight, even though both swallowed poison!

By Dave Read, July 6, 2025 performance – Today’s program, the first matinee of the Tanglewood season, was an all-Beethoven one, performed mere hours after last night’s all-Rachmanioff program. Knowing that the season finale will be Beethoven’s Ninth, which we delight to exhaust all our powers of concentration on, and the weather being ideal, we enjoyed this concert on the lawn.

Such is the luxury of life in the Berkshires, that one can take a casual approach as one of the world’s best orchestra’s performs a couple hour’s worth of the best music ever composed!

Pianist Yefim Bronfman, a long-time favorite soloist at Tanglewood, delighted the audience with his performance of Beethoven’s Piano concerto in C minor. Called back for an encore, he played a piece by Rachmanioff.

To conclude the opening of the season, the rejuvenated BSO music director Andris Nelsons led a breathtaking rendition of Beethoven’s Fifth. Despite its familiarity, especially its ominous opening quartet of notes, which the composer described as “fate knocking at the door,” this performance felt like a brand new thing.

With a rapt audience contributing to a distraction-free ambiance on lawn, not only may one bask in the sunshine of an ideal summer afternoon, but also set the imagination afloat in a musical sea.

By Dave Read, July 8, 2025 performance – Barenaked Ladies, the band from Canada, romped through an energetic set of the tunes that carried them to stardom during the Clinton presidency, including such numbers as “If I had a million dollars” and “Brian Wilson.” They are a quirky group of a band, rocking an acoustic double bass on many numbers as well as an accordion, the instrument that made Lawrence Welk popular.

As someone whose acoustic sensibility was calibrated during the 1960s, I’m an alien rather than a native member of the band’s audience, but much of it did recall the furious thunder of electric guitar, bass, and drums that characterized rock ‘n roll. After Cream and Jimi Hendrix, rock ‘n roll splintered into the many sub-genres of pop, where Barenaked Ladies now are beloved and respected elders of the MTV generation!

True to the maxim of Canadien politeness, not only did the Ladies namecheck Lenox merchants, but the bass player told the audience of his pilgrimage to the bust of Aaron Copland. He did it with such nonchalance that he must presume the audience even knows who Copland was, his connection to Tanglewood, or that John Williams commissioned the memorial of him situated on the far side of the Tanglewood campus. Good for him.

Earlier, Sugar Ray seemed to succeed in delivering an adequate dose of entertainment, but all I took away was their premature nostalgia, because most of the numbers they performed came at the end of wistful recollections of when they were hits.

By Dave Read, July 5, 2025 performance – What’s old becomes new again when summer returns to the Berkshires, because, since FDR’s second term, the Boston Symphony Orchestra is in residence for eight weeks of musical rejuvenation at Tanglewood.

Callow youth (and inchoate adults) deem the music of long-dead composers to be an old thing, obsolete as thank you/you’re welcome. Let them escape their cells and un-bud their ears, let them sit in the antique, wooden seats of the ancient Koussevitsky Music Shed, while the BSO is in performance.

Some few will get it, and fall in love with the ineffable beauty of musical excellence, as it continually renews itself through the generations. Most won’t, alas, because their hearing has been calibrated to embrace the cacophony of calumny, such as gives the republicans another term to undo what the people accomplished through FDR’s stewardship.

Music can be as delicate as the sound of a feather fluttering to the ground and as bone-rattling as thunder on the horizon. It embraces and adorns the gamut of emotion while it invites us into its airy castle for an afternoon or an evening’s respite.

We who laid down our weary burdens and attended Maestro Andris Nelsons as he led the orchestra and soloist Daniil Trifonov through a program of Rachmaninoff to open the 88th Tanglewood season were richly rewarded, as if Calliope had new gifts to bestow.

The Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor is such a tour de force that it daunts even the greatest pianists; undaunted by it, however, is Daniil Trifonov, a 34 year old from Russia, whose performance tonight adds another coat to the Shed’s refulgent soul. This was an opportunity to thrill to the interplay of orchestra and soloist; whether it was Rachmanioff’s, or any composers, intent that they appear to be in competition, that is how it felt to me.

The orchestra opens by establishing a field of warmth, which the pianist right away races through, only to be caught and embraced by the whole ensemble. They establish that each is the equal of the other, and spend the better part of an hour in conversation. The language of music is far superior to our pedestrian tongues, which trip us into tiny, tiny pools of difference. I haven’t counted the nationalities represented in this year’s version of the BSO, but tonight, the sum of them, plus a Russian pianist and Latvian conductor added up to one.