Dave Read

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 7, 2024 performance – Renee Fleming, the world-famous soprano, has been a favorite of Tanglewood audiences since her debut on the Koussevitsky Music Shed stage in 1991. Under the direction of Maestro Andris Nelsons, in concert with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, today she sang songs written for performance with music composed by Richard Strauss (1864-1949).

I have no idea what she was singing about, because when listening to music, I surrender myself to it, which means I turn off phones and screens and neither read nor write while the music unfolds itself into my imagination.

Since so many of my sisters and brothers in the Tanglewood audience feel otherwise, translated lyrics are flashed across a giant screen above the orchestra. But such only swaps German words for English words – there’s no way to translate those outdated German attitudes and mores into the American attitudes and mores we rep in the 21st century.

What I do have some idea about is how beautiful music makes me feel! Especially during Gesang der Apollopriesterin, Opus 33 No. 2, Ms. Fleming produced with her instrument sounds so refulgent that the instruments of the brass section turned green with envy. I didn’t say music makes me feel beautiful, I said I know how I feel while concentrating on the sounds produced by beautiful music.

All the sounds produced today under Maestro Nelsons’ energetic direction were splendid, every bit as splendid as is the venue that hosts Tanglewood. This Sunday matinee was performed on as beautiful a day as ever unfolds in the Berkshires.

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 8, 2024 –

Over the course of his long career, James Taylor has shared from the stage intimate biographical details, which he presents in more comprehensive fashion in an audiobook titled Break Shot. He is frank about the trauma of being uprooted as a young boy from the warmth of an old New England family into the furnace of the Jim Crow south, for his father’s medical career.

He acknowledges how he was launched into his own career by a chance encounter with a talent scout for Apple records. And, Taylor is as open about drug addiction and recovery as is anybody else in the entertainment business, and always presents an attitude of gratefulness for his career in that business.

We were in the vast audience at Tanglewood July 2, 2012 when JT shared his audience with Taylor Swift, who has since eclipsed in popularity not only James, but Jesus and the Beatles, too. Taylor Swith is no more musically gifted than James, Jesus, or the Beatles, but she has business sense to beat the band!

Although he has brought them onstage since they were little boys, now James seems eager to hand the keys to the family business over to son Henry, who seems glad to accept them. Whether young Henry’s paternal booster shot propels him to the same heights his father attained nobody knows. We can be certain, however, that his father has told him, and likely more than once, that it takes a hell of lot more than luck for any career to last fifty years, much less one that includes world class venues such as Tanglewood.

By Dave Read, July 1, 2024 – Roger Daltry looked as fit June 22, 2024, if less hirsute, as he did in August 1970 when he made his Tanglewood debut, thanks to the great Wolfgang Bill Graham who brought The Who and many other first generation rock bands and musicians to Tanglewood.

You’ll do yourself a favor, especially if you’re a fan of The Who, by firing up their Tanglewood concert on Youtube. You’ll see how efficient bands were then, when they needed nothing but instruments, amps, and envelope-pushing music to entertain an audience.

I’ve seen/heard enough of them to know that contemporary musicians and songwriters are every bit as talented as their rock ancestors – but all the extra fluff and flashbang that encumbers their shows betrays an insecurity that did not inflict the pioneers of rock ‘n roll.

Under the rubric of pop music, or even classic rock, what today’s audience seems to crave as entertainment is franchise music – original music has gone the way of the greasy spoon, replaced by microwaveable eggamuffinz in gas stations coast to coast.

And speaking of coast to coast, forget about the San Francisco sound, or new tunes bubbling up from the Village, or the bayou, Mississippi Delta, the Piedmont.. . Vulture capitalism has melted them down into an alloy of tunes that won’t tarnish, nor startle, nor teach you to boogie, much less make you lose your mind the way kids did then, back in the day.

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, April 13, 2024 – As usual, a series of “popular artist” concerts is scheduled at Tanglewood this summer, ten of which occur before the Boston Symphony opens its Berkshires schedule with an all-Beethoven program, July 5.

• John Fogerty: The Celebration Tour with Special Guests George Thorogood and the Destroyers & Hearty Har (June 20)
• Roger Daltrey with Very Special Guest KT Tunstall (June 22)
• Kool & the Gang and En Vogue (June 23)
• Boyz II Men (June 27)
• Jon Batiste (June 28)
• Trey Anastasio with the Boston Pops (June 29)
• Brandi Carlile (June 30)
• Jason Mraz with the Boston Pops (July 2)
• James Taylor and his All-Star Band (July 3 & 4, both dates sold out)
• An Evening with Pretenders (July 16)
• Beck with the Boston Pops (July 23)
• Judy Collins, Rufus Wainwright, and Indigo Girls (August 30)
• DISPATCH with Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops (August 31)

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 20, 2023 performance – The best thing about great works of art is that, being products of natural people rather than of nature herself, they may serve us for a hundred generations. If Ludwig van Beethoven were a paternal ancestor, he’d be my 12th or 13th great grandfather.

But, he’s not, because I need a map to find middle C on a piano, and one of those popular DNA/ancestor tests ruled me out of any Teutonic inheritance.

Point is that musical art has eternity within its grasp, but only so long as we mortals breathe life into it. Something like a dozen generations of people, from all over the earth, have been thrilled and uplifted by Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. People of a hundred tongues, practitioners of a hundred religions, members of a hundred political parties, citizens of more than one hundred nations keep alive this sound art made by a virtually deaf man.

Go figure.

Here in the Berkshires, home to the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer performance venue and training academy, we are invited annually to attend its performance, by world-class musicians in a breath-taking setting. It usually is performed by the BSO with a guest conductor; today it was played by the ephemeral Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra (TMCO), under the baton of Susanna Mälkki, conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra.

With the BSO already away on a European tour, the audience had an opportunity to listen to a generous sample of the musicians who will populate the world’s great orchestras for the next fifty years. The TMCO begins life in July as a most casual cohort, singing Alleluia, the choral work by Randall Thompson commissioned by Serge Koussevitsky for the academy’s 1940 opening. [Our report of 2022 opening exercise, w/ video]

After eight weeks of intense instruction and varieties of performance, the TMCO rightly commands Tanglewood’s Shed; they are right at home in this world-class venue. Command and share, I should say, because every bit their equal is the amateur Tanglewood Festival Chorus, which transforms Schiller’s German Ode to Joy into the sung language that stirs the soul of all the world’s people.

The TFC underwent something of a rejuvenation when James Burton became its second director in 2017, following the 45-year tenure of founder John Oliver (1939-2018). After announcing that the entire chorus would have to re-audition for membership, Burton was made to withstand withering criticism. As reported by expert critics and ordinary enthusiasts alike, he did the right thing, and the child of his predecessor is poised now to thrive as it thrills audiences for generations.

Today’s vocal soloists: Amanda Majeski, soprano, J’Nai Bridges, mezzo-soprano, Stephen Costello, tenor, and Jongmin Park, bass. Five Spirituals from A Child of Our Time, composed by Michael Tippett opened the program.