Tanglewood

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 25, 2024 performance – Another Tanglewood season has passed, with all its redemptive power, all its contemplative force. The Boston Symphony Orchestra almost always concludes its Berkshires sojourn with a performance of Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Opus 125, by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), which was first performed 200 years ago.

The great cellist and world citizen, Mstislav Rostropovich, conducted the first performance I attended, here in the Koussevitsky Music Shed, in 1999. Today, last minute replacement conductor Ludovic Morlot elicited a nonpareil performance from the orchestra, whose multitude of sound melded seamlessly with the poetry of Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy to send the audience, now practically levitated from their seats, into the after-Tanglewood chapter of their year.

The Tanglewood Festival Chorus, whose first performance in 1970 was Beethoven’s Ninth, has settled snugly into the second half of its first century, now under the direction of James Burton, who succeeded founder John Oliver in 2017.

Organizations such as the BSO (nee 1881) don’t reach the august stage of the ancients without due reverence for anniversaries. Celebrations also lessen the load on box office workers, because who would dare to miss a bicentennial performance of Beethoven’s Ninth in the Koussevitsky Music Shed in the 150th anniversary year of Koussevitsky’s birth, especially since the Ninth was the first piece he scheduled for performance at Tanglewood?

Way out here in the hinterlands, how drab would August be without Koussevitsky’s legacy, without the summertime tenancy of musicians from around the world, which affords us such refuge from the world of woe our people’s republic has become. I beg your leave to address what I perceive to be an error in the notes in today’s program book, where it says “…the words come from Beethoven, not Schiller.”

The sentiment may be Beethoven’s, but the words were chosen and arranged by Schiller. Beethoven could have asked a painter to produce a visual image of his symphony – and there’s no shortage of painters who have attempted to portray heavenly human harmony, but that wouldn’t make the painting his, any more than Schiller’s work is.

Metaphor is the writer’s piano, by which we speak the language of music, painting, architecture, sculpture, and dance with one tongue. Without the addition of Schiller’s poetry, audiences are left alone to find the right words – to find sensible expression for what Beethoven’s music amounts to in the soul.

Nor should we overlook the genius it took for Beethoven to paint outside the lines, to think outside the box, and marry the choral with the orchestral, which produced the singular work of art that is Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor. And we’re glad for the waves of reflected glory that comfort Schiller in otherwise chilly posterity.

As a prelude, Tanglewood Festival Chorus director James Burton led the chorus in Bruckner’s Ecce sacerdos magnus, for chorus, three trombones, and organ. The vocal soloists, who added unnameable shades and tones to Schiller’s Ode were Ambur Braid, soprano, Jess Dandy, contralto Elgan Llyr Thomas, tenor, and Davóne Tines, bass.

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 23, 2024 performance – The final Friday concert of the 2024 Tanglewood season of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summertime sojourn in the Berkshires consisted of Frederick Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Opus 11, featuring pianist Bruce Liu, followed by Edward Elgar’s Variations on an Original Theme, Opus 36, Enigma, with Ryan Bancroft conducting.

Chopin (1810-1849), a prodigy who made his debut as a pianist at age 7, was so crazy for the piano that he composed no music that wasn’t piano-centric. Besides all the brilliant music he created for us, Chopin also was a pithy wit, as this great line proves: “I’ve never heard anything so great; in it Beethoven snaps his fingers at the whole world.” (Chopin was referring to the Archduke Trio)

Who knows whether tonight’s piano soloist, Bruce Liu, ever snaps his fingers at anyone? He certainly makes an audience snap to attention when his fingers dance along the keyboard. At the conclusion of the concerto, the audience called for an encore, and I was surprised to hear another note from the piano, so exhausted I imagined it to be.

Edward Elgar, pretty much an autodidact, had the great good luck to marry the woman who would be the catalyst of his best work. As we learn in the program notes, during their thirty years of marriage, Elgar became the first English composer of widespread acclaim in two centuries; sadly, however, he completed no large works during his fourteen years as a widower.

In his own program notes on Enigma, Elgar wrote, “through and over the whole set another larger theme ‘goes,’ but is not played.” We note that his countryman, Churchill, never found the key to Russia, which he famously called a riddle, wrapped in mystery, inside an enigma. Elgar gave us the key to his: each variation represents how he imagined someone important to him would have played the original theme, beginning with his wife!

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 18, 2024 performance – The penultimate Sunday matinee of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2024 season at Tanglewood featured celebrated Berkshires homeboy Yo-Yo Ma taking his annual star turn on the Koussevitsky Music Shed stage, as soloist for a performance of Robert Schumann’s Cello concerto in A minor, Opus 129.

It made for a particularly touching moment, when departing BSO assistant conductor Earl Lee told the audience the role Mr. Ma played in his early musical development. As a boy in southern South Korea, after telling his parents he would like to play cello, he was given a laser disc titled Yo-Yo Ma at Tanglewood!

That is the sort of remark welcome from the stage at the start of a concert. It demonstrates the essential continuity of the arts, of culture. The musicians of tomorrow will have been trained and inspired by the musicians of today. When kept brief and to the point as today, there is no chance for the audience to be diverted from their purpose in attending a concert of music.

Artists of the order of Yo-Yo Ma, and earlier soloists this season, are born with such gifts that even if music weren’t available, they’d find an avenue of expression elsewhere. Having attended the master class he gave in Ozawa Hall a few years ago, we know how wonderful a teacher he is; when he performs, he is so eloquent in gesture that the lost art of pantomime also is within his ken.

Maestro Lee, music director of the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra, elicited a rousing performance of Beethoven’s seventh symphony to conclude the concert, and release us back to fraught reality, at least until we’re re-launched, one more time next week, by Beethoven’s Ninth!

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 16, 2024 performance – Another felicitous program choice makes this concert especially memorable. Guest conductor Samy Rachid led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Prokofiev’s Violin concerto No. 1 in D, Opus 19, and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. The decision to open the program with a brief “Symphonic Picture,” Dawn in the Field, by Yevgeny Svetlanov (1928-2002), amounted to the ideal appetizer for a sumptuous concert.

How wonderful, at dusk on an overcast day, to be musically transported to dawn in the field; in my case, the field was near the sea, and there were crickets. What a painter was Maestro Svenlanov, how lucky are we Tanglewoodies, to attend the BSO’s first performance of his music.

Prokofiev met us in whatever field we’d wandered to, and found us wide awake and ready for the celebrated violin prodigy, Midori, and her performance of his rather quiet concerto. Besides being a tour de force for the violins and bigger strings, this concerto demonstrates the musical value of silence, of the many tiny increments of space that make the numberless notes of a composition add up to the sounds that tickle us, that rouse or soothe us, that sometimes make us burst into applause.

For us in the Berkshires, Midori is doubly twinned to Leonard Bernstein. The violin soloist’s Tanglewood debut catapulted her to fame as had Bernstein’s conducting debut, which was done without rehearsal, as a last minute substitute for an ill conductor.

At age 14, on a bill conducted by Bernstein in 1985, while performing the conductor’s Serenade, Midori twice broke a sting, each time calmly borrowing a nearby violin to keep the performance on track. Music lovers are well-advised to add a measure of incense to their Calliope altars, in gratitude for calling our attention to Bernstein and Midori way sooner than ordinary circumstances would have.

The decision to invite Samy Rachid as guest conductor was just as smart, as he added a dynamic visual element, besides eliciting such a beautiful performance from the orchestra and soloist. As quiet and sombre as was the Prokofiev concerto, Tchaikovsky’s symphony was loud and rousing – not volume-turned-to-10 loud, just so loud as to make you wish there was more of it. As tired as an old man gets late at night, tonight I wanted to listen a little longer before returning to the noisy world.

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 11, 2024 performance – In advance of a concert program that features compositions of Mozart and Mahler, the anticipation is for an auditory experience, the visual aspect being incidental. Thanks to both guest conductor and soloist, however, today’s concert, by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood delighted the vision almost as much as it awed the hearing.

Making their BSO debuts were conductor James Gaffigan, a 2003 alumnus of the Tanglewood Music Center, and soprano Elana Villalón. Maestro Gaffigan’s emphatic, dramatic style was neatly balance by Ms. Villalón’s subtle expressiveness.

But, of course, it is the dependable excellence of the orchestra that affords conductor and soloist their opportunity. Before today, my mental shortcut description of Mahler’s music is that it is a density – a thing of heavy substance. Today, the BSO disabused me of that notion, with beautiful and delicate sounds from the woodwinds.

Even though I was certain that I had attained the summit of listening pleasure during Friday’s program, I see that I’ve been returned to my natural state of uncertainty. Such is the great gift of proximity to Tanglewood – if you keep attending concerts, your standard of excellence keeps increasing. (Perhaps we’ll discover that perfection is a mirage?)