Tanglewood

Nelsons leads 2019 Tanglewood on Parade

Article updated July 27, 2019 by Dave Read

Tanglewood on Parade took place on the penultimate Tuesday of July, only the second time this millennium that it hadn’t been scheduled for the first Tuesday in August. Since a good surmise is available, we’ll dispense with the transmission of a query up the media affairs ladder: the Maestro made it happen so he could participate, before returning to Europe for an August full of projects and programs?

BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons conducts the TMCO in Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries (Hilary Scott)

This is the BSO’s big fundraiser during Tanglewood, so, of course the music director should play a key role in the event, which includes a full afternoon of recitals and performances throughout the sprawling Tanglewood campus.

The evening concert is a spectacle of orchestras/choirs and conductors – four of each: Andris Nelsons and the BSO, Keith Lockhart with the Boston Pops, James Burton and the Boston Symphony Children’s Choir, Thomas Wilkins and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra. Providing a preview of the massive Wagner weekend following, Nelsons led the BSO in “The Ride of the Valkyries.”

Thomas Wilkins conducts the TMCO and the BSO in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (Hilary Scott)

For the grand finale, which culminates in mortar fire and pyrotechnics, Thomas Wilkins leads the combined orchestras in the endlessly renewable 1812 Overture, Tchaikovsky’s paean to a forgotten Imperial deed, which sounds like nothing more than an excuse for a staid ensemble to cut loose and kick out the jams!

Boston Symphony Orchestra
Boston Pops Orchestra
Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra
Boston Symphony Children’s Choir
Andris Nelsons, Keith Lockhart,
Thomas Wilkins, and James Burton, conductors
Program to include
WAGNER “The Ride of the Valkyries”
from Die Walku?re
James BURTON The Lost Words, for children’s
choir and orchestra (world premiere)
TCHAIKOVSKY 1812 Overture

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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.

Milos classical guitar at Tanglewood, July 17, 2019

By Dave Read – Classical guitarist Milos drew a large and appreciative audience to Ozawa Hall on July 16, the third program to feature guitar we’ve enjoyed this season at Tanglewood in the Berkshires, following concerts by Richard Thompson, also in Ozawa Hall and by Rodrigo y Gabriela in the Koussevitsky Music Shed. A full appreciation of the marvelous possibility the guitar affords an artist was apparent in each of those three programs; the opportunity to attend all three almost constitutes an embarassment of riches! (Alas, that’s life in these bucolic hills.)

Ozawa Hall environs during Milos classical guitar concert at Tanglewood; Dave Conlin Read photos.

Twenty years on the Tanglewood beat, we are delighted by the new buildings uphill from Ozawa Hall, blending into the old familiar vista – so soon ago itself an architectural and acoustic revelation.

Richard Thompson at Tanglewood, June 21, 2019

By Dave Read – Richard Thompson strode to center stage in Seiji Ozawa hall June 21, carrying a guitar, which was all it took to fill the august band box with beautiful sound. Besides being a first-ballot shoo-in for the guitar hall of fame, artist division, Thompson also is a master at the art of stagecraft. His 110 minute concert revealed him to be a generous, tenacious, and pretty funny guy. Hip to him since the days of Fairport Convention, this was my first concert, and it was awesome.

Buy Richard Thompson music;
Read about Richard Thompson at wikipedia.
Listen and watch as Richard Thompson performs his classic song “Shoot Out the Lights” on his Lowden guitar and chats with Mark Segal Kemp about his approach to playing both acoustics and electrics.

And somehow, I heard Buddy Holly throughout the show. Something about that big bold acoustic sound* – the quality of the strings, the resonance of the soundboard, the spirit of the one animating the tools of his trade.

It was a sound vein mined to such great effect by Dylan until he got bored with it and veered away in 1965 at Newport to create rock ‘n roll’s first tributary – Dylan music. Meanwhile, back across the pond, Thompson and his mates formed bands with cool names such as Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and Pentangle.

… to be continued.

*That may be my entry in the redundancy tournament.

Live From Here at Tanglewood, June 15, 2019

By Dave Read – Chris Thile has the hardest job in show biz, following Garrison Keillor as host of a live radio broadcast from the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood. The show he ran June 15, 2019, was on par with the 16 editions of Keillor’s that we covered.

Just as we remember the bit from the initial show in 2000, when the pretend Bill Clinton responds to Keillor’s inquiry as to what it’s like to be leaving the house he has called home for eight years by mimicing Bob Dylan singing Like a Rolling Stone, Thile’s troupe had us rolling in the aisles with something as funny and as original – and therefore, memorable.

They created a universe in which whenever a put-upon father (Father’s Day on the horizon) responded to his teenager in an unsatisfactory way, a clip from the awesome Harry Chapin’s Cats in the Cradle would fill the air and guilt-trip dad into action!

Thile also has pre-existing Tanglewood conditions – his maternal grandfather, a composer, had a piece performed here sixty some years ago, AND he himself is a wrangler in Yo Yo Ma’s Goat Rodeo. Keillor had one too – a second date with his eventual wife when she was a student here at BUTI. The both are right up front about how much they like Tanglewood, especially that this show concludes their live radio season. And the audience seems pretty happy too.

Listen to the show.
Cellphone snaps of the lawn audience and a couple views of the stunning new Tanglewood Learning Institute up by Ozawa Hall.

Tanglewood photos 2018 season

Article updated Nov. 16, 2018, by Dave Read

Tanglewood photos from the 2018 season, dubbed by the BSO “Summer of Lenny in the Berkshires,” which peaked on Aug. 25 with a kaleidoscopic array of artists and ensembles from the worlds of classical music, film, and Broadway. The entire first half of the program is dedicated to selections from such brilliant Bernstein works as Candide, West Side Story, Mass, and Serenade. Music from the classical canon very dear to Bernstein’s heart-selections from Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn and music by Copland, plus a new work by John Williams, makes up a good portion of the program’s second half; the finale of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony brought the program to a close.

Wynton Marsalis Quintet and Ellis Marsalis Quintet at Tanglewood, Sept. 2, 2018

By Dave Read – Wynton Marsalis is every bit the national treasure that Leonard Bernstein was and it seems that we in the Tanglewood orbit keep getting luckier. This was dubbed the Bernstein Centennial Summer, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra segment of it was bookended with concerts by artists representing the city of New Orleans, currently in the midst of its own Tricentennial celebration!

The opening weekend of the 2018 Tanglewood season included Harry Connick, Jr. in concert and the Sept. 1 concert by the Wynton Marsalis Quintet and Ellis Marsalis Quintet closed it in a manner that makes an already memorable season unforgettable! (Producers for the Sept. 2 show in the Shed requested no reviews so – mum’s the word!)

Wynton Marsalis Quintet at Tanglewood Sept. 1, 2018; Hilary Scott photo.

Somebody ought to profile those two quintessential American musicians – wouldn’t you love to read a study that compares and contrasts the lives and work of Leonard Bernstein and Wynton Marsalis? To all appearances they are utterly different, yet exactly alike as American musical artists.

Donald Hall, their late poet peer, who also performed in the Koussevitsky Music Shed (as a guest on the 2008 A Prairie Home Companion), wrote about “…poetry’s continuous assertion that opposites are identical.'” I don’t think he’d mind if we substituted ‘music’ for ‘poetry,’ in order to properly align these Tanglewood Fellows, Bernstein and Marsalis.

The quintet headed by Ellis Marsalis, father of Wynton, played a flawless opening set, almost equally divided between covers and original material. The patriarch of the first family of New Orleans musicians (son Brantford has also headlined shows here) is an impressive presence with a deft but airy touch on the piano, with a minimum of talk between pieces.

Wynton Marsalis’ deep Tanglewood roots

This was a home game for Wynton, who recalled being in the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra under the direction of Leonard Bernstein for a performance of the Prokofiev Fifth in 1979. Marsalis, while singling out Gunther Schuller and trumpter Roger Voisin, besides Bernstein, for praise, stated simply that Tanglewood changed his life. Before the concert, we heard someone talk about the 1999 program here with the BSO and Seij Ozawa plus Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra combining to perform the Peer Gynt Suite, which Duke Ellington adapted for jazz orchestra.

The concert attracted a lage Lawn audience, but a rather sparse gathering in the Shed. Perhaps Ozawa Hall was the more suitable venue for this program?