Dave Read

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 23, 2024 performance – The final Friday concert of the 2024 Tanglewood season of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summertime sojourn in the Berkshires consisted of Frederick Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Opus 11, featuring pianist Bruce Liu, followed by Edward Elgar’s Variations on an Original Theme, Opus 36, Enigma, with Ryan Bancroft conducting.

Chopin (1810-1849), a prodigy who made his debut as a pianist at age 7, was so crazy for the piano that he composed no music that wasn’t piano-centric. Besides all the brilliant music he created for us, Chopin also was a pithy wit, as this great line proves: “I’ve never heard anything so great; in it Beethoven snaps his fingers at the whole world.” (Chopin was referring to the Archduke Trio)

Who knows whether tonight’s piano soloist, Bruce Liu, ever snaps his fingers at anyone? He certainly makes an audience snap to attention when his fingers dance along the keyboard. At the conclusion of the concerto, the audience called for an encore, and I was surprised to hear another note from the piano, so exhausted I imagined it to be.

Edward Elgar, pretty much an autodidact, had the great good luck to marry the woman who would be the catalyst of his best work. As we learn in the program notes, during their thirty years of marriage, Elgar became the first English composer of widespread acclaim in two centuries; sadly, however, he completed no large works during his fourteen years as a widower.

In his own program notes on Enigma, Elgar wrote, “through and over the whole set another larger theme ‘goes,’ but is not played.” We note that his countryman, Churchill, never found the key to Russia, which he famously called a riddle, wrapped in mystery, inside an enigma. Elgar gave us the key to his: each variation represents how he imagined someone important to him would have played the original theme, beginning with his wife!

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 18, 2024 performance – The penultimate Sunday matinee of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2024 season at Tanglewood featured celebrated Berkshires homeboy Yo-Yo Ma taking his annual star turn on the Koussevitsky Music Shed stage, as soloist for a performance of Robert Schumann’s Cello concerto in A minor, Opus 129.

It made for a particularly touching moment, when departing BSO assistant conductor Earl Lee told the audience the role Mr. Ma played in his early musical development. As a boy in southern South Korea, after telling his parents he would like to play cello, he was given a laser disc titled Yo-Yo Ma at Tanglewood!

That is the sort of remark welcome from the stage at the start of a concert. It demonstrates the essential continuity of the arts, of culture. The musicians of tomorrow will have been trained and inspired by the musicians of today. When kept brief and to the point as today, there is no chance for the audience to be diverted from their purpose in attending a concert of music.

Artists of the order of Yo-Yo Ma, and earlier soloists this season, are born with such gifts that even if music weren’t available, they’d find an avenue of expression elsewhere. Having attended the master class he gave in Ozawa Hall a few years ago, we know how wonderful a teacher he is; when he performs, he is so eloquent in gesture that the lost art of pantomime also is within his ken.

Maestro Lee, music director of the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra, elicited a rousing performance of Beethoven’s seventh symphony to conclude the concert, and release us back to fraught reality, at least until we’re re-launched, one more time next week, by Beethoven’s Ninth!

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 16, 2024 performance – Another felicitous program choice makes this concert especially memorable. Guest conductor Samy Rachid led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Prokofiev’s Violin concerto No. 1 in D, Opus 19, and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. The decision to open the program with a brief “Symphonic Picture,” Dawn in the Field, by Yevgeny Svetlanov (1928-2002), amounted to the ideal appetizer for a sumptuous concert.

How wonderful, at dusk on an overcast day, to be musically transported to dawn in the field; in my case, the field was near the sea, and there were crickets. What a painter was Maestro Svenlanov, how lucky are we Tanglewoodies, to attend the BSO’s first performance of his music.

Prokofiev met us in whatever field we’d wandered to, and found us wide awake and ready for the celebrated violin prodigy, Midori, and her performance of his rather quiet concerto. Besides being a tour de force for the violins and bigger strings, this concerto demonstrates the musical value of silence, of the many tiny increments of space that make the numberless notes of a composition add up to the sounds that tickle us, that rouse or soothe us, that sometimes make us burst into applause.

For us in the Berkshires, Midori is doubly twinned to Leonard Bernstein. The violin soloist’s Tanglewood debut catapulted her to fame as had Bernstein’s conducting debut, which was done without rehearsal, as a last minute substitute for an ill conductor.

At age 14, on a bill conducted by Bernstein in 1985, while performing the conductor’s Serenade, Midori twice broke a sting, each time calmly borrowing a nearby violin to keep the performance on track. Music lovers are well-advised to add a measure of incense to their Calliope altars, in gratitude for calling our attention to Bernstein and Midori way sooner than ordinary circumstances would have.

The decision to invite Samy Rachid as guest conductor was just as smart, as he added a dynamic visual element, besides eliciting such a beautiful performance from the orchestra and soloist. As quiet and sombre as was the Prokofiev concerto, Tchaikovsky’s symphony was loud and rousing – not volume-turned-to-10 loud, just so loud as to make you wish there was more of it. As tired as an old man gets late at night, tonight I wanted to listen a little longer before returning to the noisy world.

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 11, 2024 performance – In advance of a concert program that features compositions of Mozart and Mahler, the anticipation is for an auditory experience, the visual aspect being incidental. Thanks to both guest conductor and soloist, however, today’s concert, by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood delighted the vision almost as much as it awed the hearing.

Making their BSO debuts were conductor James Gaffigan, a 2003 alumnus of the Tanglewood Music Center, and soprano Elana Villalón. Maestro Gaffigan’s emphatic, dramatic style was neatly balance by Ms. Villalón’s subtle expressiveness.

But, of course, it is the dependable excellence of the orchestra that affords conductor and soloist their opportunity. Before today, my mental shortcut description of Mahler’s music is that it is a density – a thing of heavy substance. Today, the BSO disabused me of that notion, with beautiful and delicate sounds from the woodwinds.

Even though I was certain that I had attained the summit of listening pleasure during Friday’s program, I see that I’ve been returned to my natural state of uncertainty. Such is the great gift of proximity to Tanglewood – if you keep attending concerts, your standard of excellence keeps increasing. (Perhaps we’ll discover that perfection is a mirage?)

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 9, 2024 performance – Absent as nature has been from the positive side of promotion of outdoors entertainment in the Berkshires this Tanglewood season, on a rainy night, near the end of a rainy week, a small audience collected in the Koussevitsky Music Shed, where a concert of music was performed that sounded as good to me as if Calliope, Muse of Music, were in the house.

Empty seats in the three rows ahead gave me an unobstructed view of the Kirill Gerstein’s hands as he performed Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Minor, Opus 30. During one particularly busy passage, his hands were a blur, like you’d see in a Roadrunner cartoon. But the sound produced was anything but a blur – it was an increment of beauty that flowed into and out of the beautiful ocean of sound that pours from the orchestra.

After another passage, he soundlessly swept his hand along the keyboard, as a rider may pat his charger after a gallop. It is in the nature of nature to pull off such tricks as to equate a single instrument with several score of instruments, but that is what the concerto is all about. And this one of Rachmaninoff is considered to present pianists with the ultimate challenge, met so well tonight by Mr. Gerstein.

After intermission, the performance of a rarely performed piece was followed by the performance of a veritable war horse – Igor Stravinsky’s The Right of Spring, Pictures from pagan Russia. The composition that saw a Paris audience succumb to mob behavior at its premier has become a familiar, welcome presence to symphony audiences.

Of course, that says more about the hoi polloi than it does about music or musicians. In general, people buy tickets to performances that will be pretty much like what yesterday’s performance was. In general, the people ain’t anywhere near as interested in the avant-garde as they were in new coke.

It is the job of the organization that exists to support the BSO to bridge the gap between the avant-garde, eternal province of artists, and people in search of an entertaining distraction from the omnipresent breaking-news-scape.

Historically, that job in American was done by organizations dominated and run by republicans. Since the republican party has followed its nose for profit straight into the waste stream of consumerism, the arts in America are in transition, as is everything else. Naturally, the arts in America never will be without volunteers ready, willing, and able to make the professionals get the job done right!

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 4, 2024 performance – The same composer featured on today’s program in the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood also dominates the program that will conclude the season in three weeks, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827). That’s quite an accomplishment for someone who only published nine symphonies. While Tanglewood marks the end of the season with the beloved Symphony No. 9, today’s program included the least performed and most complained about of the 712 pieces he composed that were not symphonies.

Beethoven composed the rarely performed Concerto in C, for piano, violin, and cello, Opus 54 not for the joy of musical composition alone, but so that his patron (and piano student) would have a piece he was able to play. The addition of two more solo parts balanced the work by the relative complexity of the violin and cello parts. Today, the cello part of the triple concerto is considered to be the most difficult in the repertoire. Steven Isserlis was the cello soloist, with Joshua Bell on violin and Kirill Gerstein on piano, with Alan Gilbert conducting the BSO.

After intermission, on a sunny afternoon that followed a thunderstormy morning, was Symphony No. 4 in B-flat, Opus 60. Would that the weather didn’t so limit the audience, because if place/ambience play a part in the enjoyment of music, then Tanglewood is tailor-made for the presentation of Beethoven, no matter how good he sounds elsewhere.