Dave Read

What to do in the Berkshires

What is there to do in the Berkshires, besides what’s on the schedule at Tanglewood, Jacob’s Pillow, Clark Art, MASS MoCA, Barrington Stage, Shakespeare & Co., Williamstown and Berkshire Theatre Festivals, etc.? Well, there is far more than can reasonably be posted all at once, so we’re going to begin listing events individually right here and updating the post from time to time as warranted.

Jazz concert – The Parker/Byrd Trio – Fri., Sept. 6, 2013, 8PM – Pittsfield, MA

Participating in the First Fridays Artswalk, Pittsfield Sept. 6, 2013, BerkshiresJazz.org presents The Parker/Byrd Trio. The performers include pianist Warren Byrd, drummer Tom Parker, and Dan Broad on bass. The jazz concert will be held at Baba Louie’s Backroom, 34 Depot Street, Pittsfield. Parker/Byrd Trio tickets at BerkshiresJazz.org,; the restaurant of course also makes dinner available separately.

Berkshire Music School – Family Fun Fest Sept. 7, 2013

Berkshire Music School is holding a Family Fun Fest Sat. Sept. 17 from 2 – 4pm, on the lawn of the school, 30 Wendell Ave. in Pittsfield and phone is 413-442-1411. Activities include musical games and an Instrument Petting Zoo!. Get more details: Berkshire Music School.

Bike rides in the Berkshires – September & October

The Berkshire Bike Path Council has announced a couple of upcoming events that are of interest to anybody who want to ride their bicycle in the Berkshires. Their mission is the establishment of a multi-use recreational path of approximately 75 miles that will span Berkshire county from Vermont to Connecticut.

Sept 19-22 – Berkshire to Boston Cycling Tour starting at Hancock Shaker Village
Oct 6 – Stockbridge Community Ride starting at Stockbridge Town Hall

Fall foliage events

We have just updated our guide to Fall Foliage events in the Berkshires, and will be adding listings as we learn of them.

Yo Yo Ma’s Goat Rodeo Show at Tanglewood

August 15, 2013 performance by Dave Read

If Tanglewood were simply Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, its Tanglewood Music Center and eight or nine weeks of classical music performed by the BSO and their various guest soloists and conductors, we Berkshires locals would have plenty to be grateful for. But it is so much more, for so many reasons, not least of which is that Yo Yo Ma claims it as a sort of home for his seemingly boundless musical explorations. Incidentally, he also has an actual home in the Berkshires. (Goat Rodeo Show at Tanglewood photo: Hilary Scott).

His latest musical trip led to the Goat Rodeo Sessions, the 2011 album he recorded with bsssist Edgar Meyer, fiddler Stuart Duncan, and mandolinist Chris Thile, which won Grammys for Best Folk and Best Engineered non-classical. Both the album and tonight’s show featured singer Aoife O’Donovan, of Crooked Still and Sometymes Why. She reprised No One But You, Here and Heaven, from the album and added a stunning rendition of Bob Dylan’s Farewell, Angelina.

Everybody but Mr. Ma took turns on other instruments; Meyer played piano on Franz and the Eagle, and No One But You; Thile, whose singing blended nicely with Ms. O’Donovan’s, also played fiddle and guitar; Duncan also played banjo. Except that Ma seemed to indicate that Meyer is musical director, the impression from the audience is that these are four musicians equally expert in their own domains and equally excited to be making music with peers, just for the fun of it.

Hotels in the Berkshires

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2019 Tanglewood schedule

The Boston Symphony Orchestra has released the schedule for the 2019 season at Tanglewood, which will be remembered for the opening of the Tanglewood Learning Institute, the four buildings overlooking Seiji Ozawa Hall on the Leonard Bernstein camopus.

Music director Andris Nelsons will be present for the month of July, conducting 13 programs, including the world premiere of a new work by Kevin Puts, The Brightness of Light, based on letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz on July 20, and a concert performance of Wagner’s complete Die Walküre on july 27 and 28.

2013 Tanglewood on Parade

August, 2013 performance; by Dave Read

We arrived at Tanglewood on Parade in time for the 8pm round of brass fanfares, which preceded the gala concert in the Shed. At 2pm, brass fanfares at the Main Gate heralded the beginning of an all-day celebration featuring performances throughout the Tanglewood campus by Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center, Boston University Tanglewood Institute students, and members of the BSO.

3 orchestras and 4 conductors

The gala concert included the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Boston Pops, and Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra and four conductors. Charles Dutoit led the TMCO in Borodin’s Polovetsian Dances from Prince Igor, followed by the BSO, under the baton of Stephane Deneve, playing Gershwin’s An American in Paris. After intermission, Laureate Conductor John Williams led the Pops in his own The Cowboys Overture, then current Pops conductor Keith Lockhart led them in Bernstein’s Love Theme and Finale from On the Waterfront, and then conducted a concertino on Bond Themes with the Boston Cello Quartet.

1812 Overture w/o cannon

As always, Tanglewood on Parade was brought to a close with a fiery reading of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Missing this year, alas, were the field artillery on the lawn, which always added an extra dimension to the excitement when an earth-rattling fussilade was cued by the conductor onstage. Traditionally, Eastover Resort, whose founder was a collector of Civil War memorabilia, would loan a battery of about 8 artillery pieces to Tanglewood for the day. But after a recent change in ownership and sale of the cannon, maybe it’s time to check on the whereabouts of the Civil War cannon presented to Seiji Ozawa on the occasion of his last Tanglewood on Parade in 2001 as BSO music director?

Mother Courage and her Children at Shakespeare & Co.

Aug. 2, 2013 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children now playing at Tina Packer’s Shakespeare and Co. theatre under the insightful direction of Tony Simotes, is one of the greatest plays of the 20th century. The play is set in central Europe in the 17th century during the Thirty Years’ War, which was fought largely between Catholics and Protestants.

The play demands a large cast and style of production that is deliberately alienating as it weaves together its story in a series of scenes, songs, and projected text summaries and it is never stagy. These are real people. The plot concerns Mother Courage’s unsuccessful attempt to feed and care for her children, two sons and a daughter, during the dozen years that the play covers. She has set herself up with a wagon pulled onto the stage and from it she makes her living selling food and goods to soldiers.

The wagon becomes a symbol always onstage reflecting her restless life and questionable prosperity. By the play’s end, it is a dilapidated cart and she is like an animal pulling it. Olympia Dukakis is marvelous in this, her 5th time grappling with the convoluted character. Although she is on stage most of the time, she never draws attention to herself if stress belongs to another character.

The play opens as she and the children drag onstage the cart in which she and they live. Her co-stars, Apolo Dukakis as the Chaplain and John Douglas Thompson as the Cook, each bring their own relationship and attraction to Mother Courage’s conniving. Each role is played competently.

All members of the cast are well drawn, and the audience cannot help being drawn by the most vulnerable. Of the 3 children, Kittrin, who hears but cannot speak, played by Brook Parks, moves through this role convincingly, giving her life (and the red shoes she finally gets), to save all the children in the village from attack.

Despite calamities, this play is not depressing. The characters and situations that Brecht has woven into his play have produced a gem. It is a joy to have been able to see it on a local stage. Director Tony Simotes and Olympia Dukakis have pooled their talents to create an evening in the theatre this reviewer hopes to have the time to see again before it closes in September.

Esperanza Spalding at Tanglewood

August 4, 2013 performance; by Dave Read

Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood was transformed Sunday evening into Ms. Esperanza Spalding‘s neighborhood; she is the phenom, who at age 4 made up her mind to have a life in music while watching Yo Yo Ma perform on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. A year later she had taught herself how to play violin; by 20, she was on the faculty of the Berklee College of Music; and in 2011 she won the Best New Artist Grammy, the first time it was awarded to a jazz musician.

Tonight, her neighborhood was the locale for a session of the Radio Music Society, comprised of a crackerjack 11-piece band, which takes its name from her 2012 double-Grammy release. The horn section was set up behind music stands covered by a giant radio facade. Ms. Spalding made her entrance a few moments after the band had begun laying down the hypnotic beat of Radio Song. A little later, she implored our indulgence while she got a few things off her mind, relating to “friends. family, loved ones…”. For most in the near-capacity audience, it was easy to assent to her wish, if not an outright privlege to attend to her artistry.

Going back and forth between upright acoustic bass and electric bass guitar, Ms. Spalding occupied a musical space that could evoke a range of progenitors from Willie Dixon, to Jack Bruce, to Ron Carter. And her singing is just as impressive and various, if not peerless. For an encore, she cut loose with some terrific scat in duet with pianist Leo Genovese, promising us that it would be an improvement over the previous night’s effort at the Newport Jazz Festival.

Over the course of nearly 2 hours, we were treated to an abundance of jazz that was so contextualized that if you zoomed in to a small fragment, it was indistinguishable from mainstream jazz, but when you relaxed and took the long view, the music was the dominant fragment of a larger work, and any number of sub-genres could be identified, from hip hop, to blues, to opera.

Yes indeed opera! A case could be made that opera is the most appropriate milieu for Esperanza Spalding. Besides her duly noted accomplishments as bassist, composer, and vocalist, she evinces a perfectly entertaining knack for story and drama – a sort of sturm und drang marked by a wink and a smile.

Radio Music Society followed Ms. Spalding’s Chamber Music Society, and after tonight’s performance, the last in the US, we’re left in eager anticipation of her next venture. Besides entertaining and delighting audiences, it’s probably a good bet also that she inspires young would-be musicians, because she exudes the same joy in performance as Yo Yo Ma does. How’s this for a coincidence? Mr. Ma was the featured soloist at this afternoon’s Boston Symphony Orchestra concert next-stage over in the Koussevitsky Music Shed!

Verdi’s Requiem at Tanglewood

July 27, 2013 performance; by Dave Read

Maestro Carlo Montanaro conducted a performance of Verdi’s Requiem at Tanglewood, leading four vocal soloists, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus in filling the Koussevitsky Music Shed and environs with sound sufficient to console, frighten, excite, and mollify. Verdi composed his “religious opera” in memory of his friend Alessandro Manzoni, using material (the Libera me) that he had originally composed for an abandoned collaborative work that was to honor Gioachino Rossini. Montanaro, substituting for the BSO’s new music director Andris Nelsons, injured when he banged his head on a door, swapped vacation plans for the seemingly immense job of leading 250 musicians in a performance of such a complex and familiar work.

It must have felt like deja vu all over again to BSO management, having finally settled on a young and fit successor to James Levine, whose BSO tenure was marred by lengthy stints on injured reserve. The Latvian Nelsons, who signed a five year contract BSO and threw the ceremonial first pitch for the Red Sox at Fenway Park the same day in June, probably doesn’t know the story of Wally Pipp, the New York Yankee first baseman who took a day off because of a headache in 1925, only to be substituted for by Lou Gehrig, who held the job every day for the next 14 years!

While he recuperated at home, Maestro Nelsons’ wife, soprano Kristine Opolais was on stage, along with mezzo soprano Lioba Braun, tenor Dmytro Popov, and bass-baritone Eric Owens, all of whom gave bravura performances. Here is how she described the accident to the Boston Globe “It was dark, and the door was closed, and he didn’t see it. He’s big, and he’s like a big child. It is comic.”

Attending such a performance at Tanglewood on a pleasant summer evening in the Berkshires, with a pretty full house and a very full stage holding some 200 musicians and singers, is a stimulating experience. Verdi’s Requiem opens in whispers and draws to a close in the quiet. That seems a particularly good musical idea, without a readily apparent real world analogue. Unless you view a life as an event that occurs between rests? At any rate, so one is led gently into and finally eased out of the terrific Sturm und Drang that comprises the lively 80+ minutes within. But music’s job on the mind ought not overwhelm its work on the body, so it is good to will the mind quiet during a concert. Not easy, but good.

Judging from the audience’s response, Montanaro hit it out of the park; the ovation was loud and sustained for ten minutes or so. And he enjoyed it too, sharing his response on Twitter:

Beautiful Verdi Requiem!!… Deep emotions and great music!.. Thanks to everybody for this touching performance!!..hope to see you soon..

— Carlo Montanaro (@carlomontanaro) July 28, 2013