Tanglewood

By Dave Read, July 11, 2025 performance – And now for something entirely different! Romeo and Juliet: A Theatrical Concert for Orchestra was on the bill tonight at Tanglewood’s Koussevitsky Music Shed, where the enthusiastic reaction from the audience indicates it was a big hit. BSO music director Andris Nelsons conducted the orchestra, Bill Barclay adapted and directed the theatrics.

At the core of the program was Romeo & Juliet, Opus 64, a ballet composed by Sergei Prokofiev, during the years when Stalin interfered with the arts in Russia the way a fugitive from justice does here.

This was amusing, light entertainment; with Shakespeare’s text reduced to the essential action of the doomed love story. Most of the best-known lines were kept, but heard only with some difficulty, partly due to acoustics but mostly because the actors employed a more conversational tone than a declamatory one, which I feel would have suited the setting better.

The theatrical part, itself, was a component of the very big, bright, orchestral conversation. I would think, therefore, that the spoken, textual parts should be leaned into as if they were instrumental solos – so that it plays like a theatrical concerto.

The program notes mention that the unhappy ending of Shakespeare’s play made it unacceptable to the dictates of “Soviet Realism,” where every ending must be a happy one. Informed the censors wouldn’t approve the Bard’s scenario, a determined Prokofiev responded by having Romeo appear a minute before Juliet’s demise, saying “Living people can dance, but the dead cannot dance lying down.”

Although we’re living under another terrible reign, one unfazed by death, whether in Gaza, Ukraine, or Texas, neither lover died tonight, even though both swallowed poison!

By Dave Read, July 6, 2025 performance – Today’s program, the first matinee of the Tanglewood season, was an all-Beethoven one, performed mere hours after last night’s all-Rachmanioff program. Knowing that the season finale will be Beethoven’s Ninth, which we delight to exhaust all our powers of concentration on, and the weather being ideal, we enjoyed this concert on the lawn.

Such is the luxury of life in the Berkshires, that one can take a casual approach as one of the world’s best orchestra’s performs a couple hour’s worth of the best music ever composed!

Pianist Yefim Bronfman, a long-time favorite soloist at Tanglewood, delighted the audience with his performance of Beethoven’s Piano concerto in C minor. Called back for an encore, he played a piece by Rachmanioff.

To conclude the opening of the season, the rejuvenated BSO music director Andris Nelsons led a breathtaking rendition of Beethoven’s Fifth. Despite its familiarity, especially its ominous opening quartet of notes, which the composer described as “fate knocking at the door,” this performance felt like a brand new thing.

With a rapt audience contributing to a distraction-free ambiance on lawn, not only may one bask in the sunshine of an ideal summer afternoon, but also set the imagination afloat in a musical sea.

By Dave Read, July 8, 2025 performance – Barenaked Ladies, the band from Canada, romped through an energetic set of the tunes that carried them to stardom during the Clinton presidency, including such numbers as “If I had a million dollars” and “Brian Wilson.” They are a quirky group of a band, rocking an acoustic double bass on many numbers as well as an accordion, the instrument that made Lawrence Welk popular.

As someone whose acoustic sensibility was calibrated during the 1960s, I’m an alien rather than a native member of the band’s audience, but much of it did recall the furious thunder of electric guitar, bass, and drums that characterized rock ‘n roll. After Cream and Jimi Hendrix, rock ‘n roll splintered into the many sub-genres of pop, where Barenaked Ladies now are beloved and respected elders of the MTV generation!

True to the maxim of Canadien politeness, not only did the Ladies namecheck Lenox merchants, but the bass player told the audience of his pilgrimage to the bust of Aaron Copland. He did it with such nonchalance that he must presume the audience even knows who Copland was, his connection to Tanglewood, or that John Williams commissioned the memorial of him situated on the far side of the Tanglewood campus. Good for him.

Earlier, Sugar Ray seemed to succeed in delivering an adequate dose of entertainment, but all I took away was their premature nostalgia, because most of the numbers they performed came at the end of wistful recollections of when they were hits.

By Dave Read, July 5, 2025 performance – What’s old becomes new again when summer returns to the Berkshires, because, since FDR’s second term, the Boston Symphony Orchestra is in residence for eight weeks of musical rejuvenation at Tanglewood.

Callow youth (and inchoate adults) deem the music of long-dead composers to be an old thing, obsolete as thank you/you’re welcome. Let them escape their cells and un-bud their ears, let them sit in the antique, wooden seats of the ancient Koussevitsky Music Shed, while the BSO is in performance.

Some few will get it, and fall in love with the ineffable beauty of musical excellence, as it continually renews itself through the generations. Most won’t, alas, because their hearing has been calibrated to embrace the cacophony of calumny, such as gives the republicans another term to undo what the people accomplished through FDR’s stewardship.

Music can be as delicate as the sound of a feather fluttering to the ground and as bone-rattling as thunder on the horizon. It embraces and adorns the gamut of emotion while it invites us into its airy castle for an afternoon or an evening’s respite.

We who laid down our weary burdens and attended Maestro Andris Nelsons as he led the orchestra and soloist Daniil Trifonov through a program of Rachmaninoff to open the 88th Tanglewood season were richly rewarded, as if Calliope had new gifts to bestow.

The Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor is such a tour de force that it daunts even the greatest pianists; undaunted by it, however, is Daniil Trifonov, a 34 year old from Russia, whose performance tonight adds another coat to the Shed’s refulgent soul. This was an opportunity to thrill to the interplay of orchestra and soloist; whether it was Rachmanioff’s, or any composers, intent that they appear to be in competition, that is how it felt to me.

The orchestra opens by establishing a field of warmth, which the pianist right away races through, only to be caught and embraced by the whole ensemble. They establish that each is the equal of the other, and spend the better part of an hour in conversation. The language of music is far superior to our pedestrian tongues, which trip us into tiny, tiny pools of difference. I haven’t counted the nationalities represented in this year’s version of the BSO, but tonight, the sum of them, plus a Russian pianist and Latvian conductor added up to one.

By Dave Read, July 4, 2025 performance – Like 48% of teenagers during the 1960s, James Taylor used a guitar as the sword and shield that would convey him from troubled adolescence into assured adulthood. Almost magically, his turned into a ticket to ride the Fab Four Express to unimaginable highs, and foreseeable lows.

Tonight’s show marks 51 years since he made his Tanglewood debut, which came six years after The Beatles made him the first American to carry their brand into the pop music marketplace. The Apple LP James Taylor was a critical success but a marketplace flop because he wasn’t able to tour widely in support of it, needing instead to retreat in support of himself.

During the first fifty years, the most memorable audience reaction always followed mention of Stockbridge and the Berkshires in Sweet Baby James. Tonight however, the audience’s delight in the local namechecks sounded like a whisper compared to the roar of hatred that erupted when Taylor said “no kings” after saying that You’ve Got a Friend was written for him by Carole King. It was a frightening eruption of mass hatred, an example of how mobs behave.

It was a display of the same energy that powered Jan. 6, which means that it is precisely the opposite of the Common Sense that powered the American Revolution 249 years ago. Pop music isn’t meant to power politics or do anything besides allow people momentary retreat from an increasingly troubled world.

But maybe things are upside down now in America. Maybe the populism Trump incubated for fifteen years in the popular medium of TV, then rode populism’s rude mob into the White House, twice, means that only anti-Trump pop idols have meaningful political power today. It has been a frighteningly long time since anybody has wielded a popular pen in pursuit of honest political purpose.

And tonight, our rare pop idol hinted that his own swan song is imminent. Would that he put that power to good use; it must shock him every time he says “no kings.” Our founders left unharmed their royal nemesis, but they took care to defeat his armed forces. The only takeaway from this concert is that the people are starved for leadership. Pop stars can lead their mobs of fans to troughs of reason, but can they make them reasonable?

By Dave Read, June 28, 2025 performance – Jon Batiste hosted a joy party on the second Saturday of summer 2025 at Tanglewood. Describing himself as a member the fourth generation of piano players in a family raised in the zydeco country of Lafayette, Louisiana, tonight’s show combined a large measure of call and response playfulness, with a more sublime measure of musical meditation.

If comparison of artists is always a perilous business, it is impossible not to be reminded of Louis Armstrong while Mr. Batiste performs. Both sons of the Crescent City, not only are they nonpareil musicians, but both smile(d) so brilliantly they make sadness scurry away. If anybody needs to see growth in the American character, see it in the fact that Mr. Batiste isn’t scorned for performing songs that enjoy widespread popularity, the way Satchmo was for including the likes of Hello Dolly in his setlists.

Batiste plays Beethoven

The only reason tonight’s setlist doesn’t qualify for a grammy-level award is because the music business has no imagination, but sees nothing beyond the bottom line. That Batiste sees beyond it is especially evident in the Beethoven part of tonight’s program. One piece, opening with the most familiar four notes in music that start Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, continued through variations on the ever familiar motif, before delivering it to an ecstatic resolution in Congo Square.

Batiste followed that with a strong but delicate reading of Fur Elise, the poignant bagatelle Beethoven composed to convey his unrequited love for an unknown Elise. And so our host excludes no primary emotion from the program, and thus makes room for full indulgence of our secondary appetite for play.

Early and late in the program were the ever popular Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and Oh When the Saints. There also was a number called Worship Drum Circle that spanned half an hour, but nobody was looking at their watches. If sheds had memories, then that number would have reminded the Koussevitsky Music Shed of Santana’s performance there in 1970!