Dave Read

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 2, 2024 performance – Boston Pops conductor emeritus John Williams was unable to attend the concert he prepared for performance in the Koussevitsky Music Shed. In his stead, David Newman joined guest conductor Ken-David Masur for a concert of music composed for Hollywood and TV. Maestro Newman is the son of famed composer Alfred Newman, whom Williams met at 23, to begin a lifetime friendship with the Newman family.

Half of the ten items on the program were composed by Maestro Williams, the balance by Korngold, North, Mancini, Bernstein (Lenny, not Elmer), and Raskin.

Early on, Maestro Masur, son of famed New York Philharmonic music director Kurt Masur, whose finale with the New Yorkers was here in the Shed in 2002, told us that Williams wants us to understand that film music is a genre in its infancy, compared to ancient classical music.

If so, then Tanglewood’s own John Williams qualifies for progenitor status in the emerging genre. Another way to look at it is to consider movie music the place where the art of orchestral composition meets the entertainment of motion pictures. Entertainment is like fastfood – it has to be the same in natural, upscale Nantucket as it is in beautiful, downtown Burbank.

The production of movies and TV is so expensive that financiers seldom back experimentation, the essential element of every work of art. Financed projects that produce big profits are likely to produce sequels, even prequels, so that no profit is left unharvested.

Tonight’s program includes a photo that shows the bust of Aaron Copland, in the Formal Garden at the eastern edge of the Tanglewood campus. It is yet another gift to us all from Maestro Williams, who already stands alongside Koussevitsky, Copland, Bernstein, and Ozawa in Tanglewood’s Inner Circle.

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 28, 2024 performance – When Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Andris Nelsons opened the second part of the program that would close the orchestra’s weekend celebration of the 150th anniversary of Serge Koussevitsky’s birth, he made a conductor’s decision that, in my mind, created a new work by the merging of two discrete compositions.

He cued the orchestra to begin Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms before the audience had time to applaud Randall Thompson’s Alleluia, which they were poised to greet with the great ovation it deserved. Composed at Koussevitsky’s request, for the 1940 inauguration of the Tanglewood (nee Berkshire) Music Center, it has been performed by every class since, at their opening exercises. Now held in Ozawa Hall, free and open to the public, they were held this year during the afternoon of the BSO’s opening night concert.

The six minute piece was performed after intermission, after the audience had already been thrilled by Aaron Copland’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, with soloist Paul Lewis. Copland stands near Koussevitsky in the inner circle of the Tanglewood pantheon. Today’s program includes a photo of the Copland bust that was commissioned by Boston Pops conductor emeritus John Williams, for placement in the formal garden at the eastern end of the sprawling Tanglewood campus.

My introduction to the piece came during Ozawapalooza, the weekend of farewell to Seiji Ozawa at the conclusion of his 29 year BSO tenure. On that sun-drenched but star-filled Sunday afternoon in the Shed, Maestro Ozawa led the massive audience in the most moving sing-along of all time. Souvenir copies of the sheet music had been distributed to the audience.

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 26, 2024 performance – Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Andris Nelsons chose, as the downbeat to the BSO’s Koussevitsky 150 Celebration weekend, the Tanglewood founder’s Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra, Opus 3, and Edwin Barker, the orchestra’s principal double bassist, as soloist. That must’ve felt especially gratifying to Barker, who is set to retire next spring.

No matter how intently I listened, as the the music filled the Shed and environs, I kept imagining the composer, as he conducts score upon score of violin, flute, and piano concerti, say to himself (soto voce), “double basses do it better!”

Maestro Koussevitsky (1874-1951) was soloist when the symphony was premiered in Moscow in 1905. Somehow, tonight marks its Tanglewood debut. Let’s hope there’s a more reasonable interval before it’s heard again in the Koussevitsky Music Shed, at the heart of Koussevitskyania, a.k.a. Tanglewood.

Oddly enough, the written word was elevated to the level of heard music for the pair of pieces performed post-intermission, The Origin of Fire, for baritone, male chorus, and orchestra, opus 32, by Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) and Prometheus, Poem of Fire, Opus 60, for piano, chorus, and orchestra, by Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915).

Over the heads of the orchestra hung a screen upon which first streamed text from the Finnish creation myth, Kalevala, then the more universal, but no less mythic, Prometheus poem.

Tonight’s program taught me not to be dismissive of the intrusion of text into what I hope and expect to be a sonorous, rather than a literary, occasion. That is because I followed along with much of the Finnish myth, and was delighted at its childlike innocence.

We are introduced to the wet nurse assigned to the care and feeding of the infant nation, informed that she “holds the ‘sparklet’ with confidence,” until she drops it, and it falls through nine protective levels before it splits the earth in two. That sure beats the myth of Columbus, the Pilgrims, and the new 1619 Myth recently proposed by the New York Times.

Yefim Bronfman was soloist for the concluding piece and James Burton conducted the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, which gets another star turn during the program on Sunday, to conclude the Koussevitsky celebration weekend. The chorus, an organization of amateurs, never fails to enrich the work of their seated, professional colleagues.

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 21, 2024 performance – There was something of an amateur hour on this bright Sunday afternoon in the Kousevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood, the summer home in the Berkshires of the Boston Symphoney Orchestra.

The program opened with Three Places in New England (Orchestral Set No. 1), composed by Charles Ives (1874-1954), an insurance executive who composed music for personal edification, rather than for pay, which puts the distinction between amateur and professional in sharp focus.

Symphony orchestras are historically republican institutions, none more so than the one in Boston, a town so conservative that it’s where the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and Cabots speak only to God. The program notes that accompany today’s program indicate that we owe a big debt of gratitude to the orchestra’s “resident avant-gardist,” Nicolas Slonimsky, whose friend Henry Cowell, another amateur composer, introduced him to Mr. Ives.

The amateur composer paid to have it performed in Cuba and Europe by the BSO, but the glorious composition, which pays better and more lasting tribute to the Berkshires than a barrel of p.r. professionals ever could, wasn’t performed here until 2007.

Since then, it has been performed several times by the BSO, and seems likely to every so often steal an afternoon or evening from the composer’s canonized European colleagues, thanks to the formerly republican BSO!

Local and global favorite, Emmanuel Ax was the guest soloist for the Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Opus 37, of Beethoven. Maestro Nelsons elicited beautiful performances all afternoon from the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra on a program that concluded with the famous tone poem of Richard Straus, Also sprach Zarathustra.

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 19, 2024 – Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) composed The Age of Anxiety, with a commission from mentor Serge Koussevitsky, in the aftermath of WWII, after reading W.H. Auden’s poem of the same name. He issued a revised version of Symphony No. 2, for piano and orchestra in 1965, to undo its over reliance on poetics. He regarded it as “one of the most shattering examples of pure virtuosity in the history of English poetry.”

Every generation needs virtuosi like Bernstein and Auden (1909-1973), even if we still wind up where we are today, when the moving image of mass media has practically made the printed word obsolete.

Dina Slobodeniouk conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra and piano soloist Conrad Tao in this Koussevitsky Music Shed performance, on as pleasant an evening as the Berkshires produces this deep into summer.

It always is a special treat to listen to both a great soloist and a great orchestra and tonight was no exception. In response to the audience’s applause, Mr. Tao returned and paid tribute to Bernstein with an encore of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, the ballad Harold Arlen composed for Bernstein’s West Side Story.

While the music and poetry of Bernstein and Auden are immortal, the era they shared with each other is as alien to the general public as is the one shared by Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Johannes Brahms (1832-1897), whose Symphony No. 3 in F was performed after intermission.

Brahms is said to have composed it all at once during the summer of 1883 in Wiesbaden. In the artful hands of Maestro Slobodeniuk and the BSO, it proved a brilliant coda to a splendid evening of music.