Dave Read

By Dave Read, July 4, 2025 performance – Like 48% of teenagers during the 1960s, James Taylor used a guitar as the sword and shield that would convey him from troubled adolescence into assured adulthood. Almost magically, his turned into a ticket to ride the Fab Four Express to unimaginable highs, and foreseeable lows.

Tonight’s show marks 51 years since he made his Tanglewood debut, which came six years after The Beatles made him the first American to carry their brand into the pop music marketplace. The Apple LP James Taylor was a critical success but a marketplace flop because he wasn’t able to tour widely in support of it, needing instead to retreat in support of himself.

During the first fifty years, the most memorable audience reaction always followed mention of Stockbridge and the Berkshires in Sweet Baby James. Tonight however, the audience’s delight in the local namechecks sounded like a whisper compared to the roar of hatred that erupted when Taylor said “no kings” after saying that You’ve Got a Friend was written for him by Carole King. It was a frightening eruption of mass hatred, an example of how mobs behave.

It was a display of the same energy that powered Jan. 6, which means that it is precisely the opposite of the Common Sense that powered the American Revolution 249 years ago. Pop music isn’t meant to power politics or do anything besides allow people momentary retreat from an increasingly troubled world.

But maybe things are upside down now in America. Maybe the populism Trump incubated for fifteen years in the popular medium of TV, then rode populism’s rude mob into the White House, twice, means that only anti-Trump pop idols have meaningful political power today. It has been a frighteningly long time since anybody has wielded a popular pen in pursuit of honest political purpose.

And tonight, our rare pop idol hinted that his own swan song is imminent. Would that he put that power to good use; it must shock him every time he says “no kings.” Our founders left unharmed their royal nemesis, but they took care to defeat his armed forces. The only takeaway from this concert is that the people are starved for leadership. Pop stars can lead their mobs of fans to troughs of reason, but can they make them reasonable?

By Dave Read, June 28, 2025 performance – Jon Batiste hosted a joy party on the second Saturday of summer 2025 at Tanglewood. Describing himself as a member the fourth generation of piano players in a family raised in the zydeco country of Lafayette, Louisiana, tonight’s show combined a large measure of call and response playfulness, with a more sublime measure of musical meditation.

If comparison of artists is always a perilous business, it is impossible not to be reminded of Louis Armstrong while Mr. Batiste performs. Both sons of the Crescent City, not only are they nonpareil musicians, but both smile(d) so brilliantly they make sadness scurry away. If anybody needs to see growth in the American character, see it in the fact that Mr. Batiste isn’t scorned for performing songs that enjoy widespread popularity, the way Satchmo was for including the likes of Hello Dolly in his setlists.

Batiste plays Beethoven

The only reason tonight’s setlist doesn’t qualify for a grammy-level award is because the music business has no imagination, but sees nothing beyond the bottom line. That Batiste sees beyond it is especially evident in the Beethoven part of tonight’s program. One piece, opening with the most familiar four notes in music that start Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, continued through variations on the ever familiar motif, before delivering it to an ecstatic resolution in Congo Square.

Batiste followed that with a strong but delicate reading of Fur Elise, the poignant bagatelle Beethoven composed to convey his unrequited love for an unknown Elise. And so our host excludes no primary emotion from the program, and thus makes room for full indulgence of our secondary appetite for play.

Early and late in the program were the ever popular Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and Oh When the Saints. There also was a number called Worship Drum Circle that spanned half an hour, but nobody was looking at their watches. If sheds had memories, then that number would have reminded the Koussevitsky Music Shed of Santana’s performance there in 1970!

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 25, 2024 performance – Another Tanglewood season has passed, with all its redemptive power, all its contemplative force. The Boston Symphony Orchestra almost always concludes its Berkshires sojourn with a performance of Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Opus 125, by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), which was first performed 200 years ago.

The great cellist and world citizen, Mstislav Rostropovich, conducted the first performance I attended, here in the Koussevitsky Music Shed, in 1999. Today, last minute replacement conductor Ludovic Morlot elicited a nonpareil performance from the orchestra, whose multitude of sound melded seamlessly with the poetry of Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy to send the audience, now practically levitated from their seats, into the after-Tanglewood chapter of their year.

The Tanglewood Festival Chorus, whose first performance in 1970 was Beethoven’s Ninth, has settled snugly into the second half of its first century, now under the direction of James Burton, who succeeded founder John Oliver in 2017.

Organizations such as the BSO (nee 1881) don’t reach the august stage of the ancients without due reverence for anniversaries. Celebrations also lessen the load on box office workers, because who would dare to miss a bicentennial performance of Beethoven’s Ninth in the Koussevitsky Music Shed in the 150th anniversary year of Koussevitsky’s birth, especially since the Ninth was the first piece he scheduled for performance at Tanglewood?

Way out here in the hinterlands, how drab would August be without Koussevitsky’s legacy, without the summertime tenancy of musicians from around the world, which affords us such refuge from the world of woe our people’s republic has become. I beg your leave to address what I perceive to be an error in the notes in today’s program book, where it says “…the words come from Beethoven, not Schiller.”

The sentiment may be Beethoven’s, but the words were chosen and arranged by Schiller. Beethoven could have asked a painter to produce a visual image of his symphony – and there’s no shortage of painters who have attempted to portray heavenly human harmony, but that wouldn’t make the painting his, any more than Schiller’s work is.

Metaphor is the writer’s piano, by which we speak the language of music, painting, architecture, sculpture, and dance with one tongue. Without the addition of Schiller’s poetry, audiences are left alone to find the right words – to find sensible expression for what Beethoven’s music amounts to in the soul.

Nor should we overlook the genius it took for Beethoven to paint outside the lines, to think outside the box, and marry the choral with the orchestral, which produced the singular work of art that is Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor. And we’re glad for the waves of reflected glory that comfort Schiller in otherwise chilly posterity.

As a prelude, Tanglewood Festival Chorus director James Burton led the chorus in Bruckner’s Ecce sacerdos magnus, for chorus, three trombones, and organ. The vocal soloists, who added unnameable shades and tones to Schiller’s Ode were Ambur Braid, soprano, Jess Dandy, contralto Elgan Llyr Thomas, tenor, and Davóne Tines, bass.