July 6, 2015 Article by Dave Read

The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2015 Tanglewood season got underway with an all-American program of works by John Harbison, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and Duke Ellington. While BSO music director Andris Nelsons was conducting in Germany, the orchestra was led tonight by French conductor Jacques Lacombe, who made his Tanglewood debut last year.

The program opened with John Harbison’s Remembering Gatsby (Foxtrot for Orchestra), a delightful eight minute piece from his opera The Great Gatsby, which was performed by the orchestra and chorus of Emmanuel Music in Ozawa Hall in 2013. Mr. Harbison came to the podium afterwards to take a bow with the orchestra.

Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F, with Kirill Gerstein

It took a couple minutes to prepare the stage for the next piece, to modify the podium, make room for several additional musicians, and to set up the piano center stage. Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F, featuring Russian-born pianist Kirill Gerstein, was the highlight of the program, eliciting roars of applause from the audience. Both orchestra and soloist have plenty of starring opportunities in this piece, but Gerstein may have stolen the show tonight. His performance was so fluid and luminous that it commanded your full attention; but then listening intently to the piano parts only served to burnish the brilliance of the orchestra’s playing!

Gerstein, who has played twice before at Tanglewood, has quite a varied and impressive resume. While a youngster receiving classical training, he taught himself jazz and after coming to the attention of vibraphonist, composer, and jazz educator Gary Burton during a trip to the Soviet Union, he moved to Boston to study jazz piano, becoming at 14, the youngest student ever at Berklee College of Music, and spent two summers at the BU Tanglewood Institute. Today he is artist-in-residence at Berklee and member of the piano and chamber music faculty at the Boston Conservatory.

Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, Ellington’s Harlem

Sad to say, but the exuberance elicited by the first portion of tonight’s program made it difficult to attend with an appropriate seriousness to Aaron Copland‘s elegaic Licnoln Portrait, in the second – especially given the recent murders in Charlestown, SC, which deepened the sadness of how we have failed to attain the quality of nationhood envisioned by Lincoln. John Douglas Thompson, the actor who has performed frequently with Shakespeare & Co., was eloquent and powerful in the spoken part.

Dec. 6, 2014 Article by Dave Read

Reading the New Yorker is always an entertaining and edifying activity, and sometimes more, such as when I got a rush of sympatico from an article by Alex Ross in the Dec. 1, 2014 issue, Brushfires; Andris Nelsons energizes the Boston Symphony. The caption of the accompanying illustration reads, “On the podium, Nelsons, a galvanic young Latvian, lunges about uninhibitedly.” It remined me of my effort to describe Maestro Nelsons during his first Tanglewood concert since being named BSO Music director, the July 11, 2014 program featuring Anne-Sophie Mutter performing Dvorak’s Violin Concerto.
“There was a moment toward the end of the Violin concerto, with Ms. Muter at rest, when he almost stepped off the podium, crouching and reaching toward the violins to draw forth a soft passage. He left footprints and handprints all over the podium, like an animal marking territory.”

lexicon of the music critic

Being totally unschooled in the lexicon of the music critic, I’m pretty much left to write about the appearance of a concert, leaving the cognoscenti to describe how the music sounds in relation to how they think it should sound. Orchestras such as the Boston Symphony project a uniform, practically static image, which makes it easy for the conductor to be the focus of my attention, as he (and sometimes she) articulates his musical directives by way of gestures. And this gesticulation can range from eloquent to akward, from geriatric to gymnastic, from martial to manic.

In his New Yorker article, Ross says that “… Nelsons lunges about uninhibitedly, violating textbook rules about the wisdom of minimizing one’s gestures. I imagine that Boston players have already mastered imitations of his signature moves: the Backward Lean, the Extreme Crouch, the Trapeze Grab, the Across-the-Table Ice-Cream Scoop.”

So it is good to know that a respected music critic deems a conductor’s gesticulations worthy of more than a passing mention, and that the lexicon needn’t be staid. It feels like getting permission to be playful even while writing about highbrow stuff! Thanks to Alex Ross, I’ll take a stab at adding to the lexicon when Nelsons returns to Tanglewood next July.

[bctt tweet=”Watching Andris Nelsons conduct.”]

Article by Dave Read

Billed as Oz with Orchestra, the Tanglewood presentation of a newly restored print of The Wizard of Oz, vocals and dialogue intact and paired with the Boston Pops’ performance of the original orchestration, made for a thoroughly entertaining experience. Way more than a mere nostalgia kick, it commanded your attention, leaving no room for daydreaming. Reflections on childhood viewings had to be postponed until afterwards, when an especially animated and chatty crowd strolled back to the parking lots around 11 PM.

Like many in the audience tonight, my experience with The Wizard of Oz dates back to the days of black and white television and the annual broadcasts from 1956 onward. I dug this movie from the get-go, even as an under-age iconoclast disapproving anything my sisters liked. And tonight I responded with the unbridled joy of an over-aged optimist!

Conductor Keith Lockart’s established versatility was on full display as he used a pair of digital devices to lead the Boston Pops in their supporting role. It was a seamless collaboration between the orchestra and the movie projected on a large screen overhead. They didn’t intrude, but their playing was a welcome embellishment throughout.

Two especially noteworthy elements were the color and the choreography. It was a riot of color, which I’d describe as psychedelic if it weren’t for how sharply defined every fanciful object and background was. And the choreography was a revelation. What I would’ve called clowning around when I saw it as a kid tonight looked like deceptively artful dancing. The scene where Dorothy encounters the Scarecrow may as well be called a pas de deux. Ray Bolger had a genius that made stumbling look poetic.

True enough There’s no place like home – but neither is there anyplace quite like Tanglewood, where fondly recalled experiences from childhood can be reprinted in memory in the most delightful Technicolor fashion.