Tanglewood

June 17, 2016 Tanglewood concert review by Dave Read

Dolly Parton opened the 2016 Tanglewood season on her Pure & Simple tour, attacting an impressive audience on a picnic-perfect June evening; watching her fans stream into the Koussevitsky Music Shed was the closest we’ll ever get to seeing a Mardi Gras parade in Lenox. In a show that lasted 2.5 hours and included 28 songs, she also told so many stories that you wish you’d brought along a stenographer. Dolly Parton emerged some fifty years ago onto a fairly cloistered country western scene which she helped bust loose into a dominate place in pop culture, becoming head of a global entertainment business while maintaining her charm, her artistic integrity, and her figure!

Dolly Parton’s Pure & Simple tour

Ms. Parton’s Pure & Simple tour is organized around a CD, to be released in August, which contains a suite of love songs she wrote to celebrate her fiftieth wedding anniversary. Love seems to be Dolly Parton’s organizing principle, and much of her patter relates to her love of her own family, her childhood home in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, and then to the family all of us comprise. After that, she talks alot about her rhinestone costumes and her boobs. But perhaps the most remarkable thing she talked about is the Imagination Library, which she established in 1995 for the benefit of children in her childhood home, as a tribute to her illiterate father. Since then, it has given away 100,000,000 books, many to children.

Making up Dolly’s band were Richard Dennison, Tom Rutledge, and Kent Wells (and a drum machine) and besides displaying her beautiful vocal technique, Ms. Parton also played a half-dozen instruments, including banjo, which she played backwards on one number! Especially endearing was a medley of ’60s songs, including The Night They Drove Ol’ Dixie Down, mentioning her affection for Levon Helm and The Band, and announcing that his daughter, the musician Amy Kelm, was in attendance.

August 12, 2015 Tanglewood concert review by Dave Read

The culmination of the Tanglewood Music Center’s 75th anniversary celebration was the Aug. 8, 2015 performance of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, the Symphony of a Thousand, with BSO music director Andris Nelsons conducting 363 musicians, including the TMC Fellows, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, eight leading vocal soloists, the Boston University Tanglewood Institute Chorus, the American Boychoir, and members of the BSO. Not only was this concert an impressive spectacle, but it was as thrilling a musical experience as one could imagine.

Latin hymn combined with Goethe’s Faust

For a brief video of this performance, visit streambso.org, where you’ll see that Mahler’s 8th opens loud and bright, organ and choir invoking a church-like setting. But however universal every doctrine claims its scope, this performance of Mahler’s 8th would bear no doctrinal delimitation; this celebration was no church-going event! Mahler’s treatment of Goethe’s text is practically a sampler of musical styles and ideas, leading to the final chorus. The journey is spellbinding, building naturally to a close, nothing forced, no straining, the accumulation of one beautiful sound after another until your senses – and your soul, have been thouroughly engaged and satisfied.

About Tanglewood: box office, tickets, getting there, nearby hotels

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Getting around the Tanglewood campus

The Tanglewood campus, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Tanglewood Music Center comprises several hundred acres in the towns of Lenox and Stockbridge. It is the location of the Koussevitsky Music Shed and Ozawa Hall, where hundreds of thousands attend concerts and a variety of events, including picnics. We always advise new visitors to arrive early and take their daily walking exercise wandering the beautiful Tanglewood grounds.

Here is a dynamic map of the Tanglewood grounds, with photos and information for such points of interest as Aaron Copland Library, Highwood Manor House, The Glass House, and The Lion’s Gate.

August 7, 2015 Article by Dave Read

This year’s Tanglewood on Parade Gala Concert, the Tanglewood Music Center’s main fundraising event, was an especially satisfying evening of music, even if a little sad because John Williams’ health prevented his participation. With the Boston Pops conductor laureate absent, tonight’s audience was made to settle for three conductors, instead of the usual four, but got to witness the Pops debut of Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Andris Nelsons.

The program got underway with Nelsons leading the BSO in selections from Berlioz, Ravel, and Shostokovich. Maestro Nelsons didn’t address the audience tonight, but he certainly was communicative, displaying an uncanny vocabulary of conducting gestures. So fluid and captivating as he cajoles and exhorts the orchestra, this successor to Koussevitsky makes you think he may, as well, be a disciple of Balanchine.

In the next segment, popular guest conductor Stephane Deneve led the Fellows of the TMC in three John Williams compositions. Deneve was both funny and eloquent as he talked about his own affection for Williams and in introducing the compositions, including Just down West Street … on the left, Williams’ gift in honor of the TMC’s 75th anniversary. The Violin Concerto, a tribute to his first wife whao had just died, featured longtime Pops concertmaster Tamara Smirnova taking a rare turn as soloist.

Boston Pops pay tribute to Frank Sinatra
The festivities resumed after intermission with Keith Lockhart conducting the Boston Pops in Kabalevsky’s Overture to Colas Breugnon, followed by A Tribute to Frnk Sinatra: “Ole Blue Eyes at 100.” Not only were the Pops’ great jazz chops again in evidence, but so was the clarity of their enunciation, as you could practically hear the lyrics in their renditions of Chicago and New York, New York.

Star Wars and the Cold War

Pops conductor Lockhart then introduced the Pops debut of Maestro Nelsons for the performance of another John Williams selection, Throne Room & finale from Star Wars. During the Reagan Administration, “Star Wars” became the nickname for the Strategic Defense Initiative, one of the closing initiatives of the Cold War, which is notable because Reagan’s Secretary of State, George P. Shultz, a frequent Tanglewood patron, was in the audience tonight.

Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture

No matter how exciting the program and how brilliant the performances, everything else is merely prelude to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, which always concludes the gala concert, itself the finale to the annual day-long celebration of music at Tanglewood. We heard an unusual rendition of it here last month, performed by the Boston Pops Brass & Percussion section and two world-champion drum and bugle corps, the Blue Devils of California and the Boston Crusaders. While that was great fun, tonight’s rendition, under Nelson’s impassioned direction, was truly breathtaking.

July 8, 2015 Article by Dave Read

The Tanglewood Brass Spectacular featured performances by the Boston Pops Brass & Percussion section, the Boston Crusaders, the third-oldest drum corps in America, celebrating their 75th anniversary; and the sixteen-time Drum Corps International World Champion Blue Devils from Concord, California. The program was suggested by BSO trumpeter and drum corps alumnus Michael Martin, whose father Freddy Martin, one of the genre’s most esteemed figures, was a conductor and composer on tonight’s program.

First, the host ensemble performed a variety of pieces, including two by Boston Pops laureate conductor John Williams. They demonstrated why the Pops and the BSO always sound so good when they veer into the jazz and pop realms, because these players sure can swing! Then the Blue Devils and Boston Crusaders took turns, each filling the Koussevitsky Music Shed stage with an assortment of musical instruments never seen there before. Besides all the horns and drums, there was an array of vibrophones from wing to wing.

Massed bands perform Tcahikovsky’s 1812 Overture

The 2+ hour concert closed with an unprecented performance by all three ensembles of Tcahikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Tanglewood patrons are used to exciting performances of that chestnut as the finale to the annual Tanglewood on Parade, but tonight’s rendition was truly breathtaking.