Tanglewood

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 9, 2024 performance – Absent as nature has been from the positive side of promotion of outdoors entertainment in the Berkshires this Tanglewood season, on a rainy night, near the end of a rainy week, a small audience collected in the Koussevitsky Music Shed, where a concert of music was performed that sounded as good to me as if Calliope, Muse of Music, were in the house.

Empty seats in the three rows ahead gave me an unobstructed view of the Kirill Gerstein’s hands as he performed Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Minor, Opus 30. During one particularly busy passage, his hands were a blur, like you’d see in a Roadrunner cartoon. But the sound produced was anything but a blur – it was an increment of beauty that flowed into and out of the beautiful ocean of sound that pours from the orchestra.

After another passage, he soundlessly swept his hand along the keyboard, as a rider may pat his charger after a gallop. It is in the nature of nature to pull off such tricks as to equate a single instrument with several score of instruments, but that is what the concerto is all about. And this one of Rachmaninoff is considered to present pianists with the ultimate challenge, met so well tonight by Mr. Gerstein.

After intermission, the performance of a rarely performed piece was followed by the performance of a veritable war horse – Igor Stravinsky’s The Right of Spring, Pictures from pagan Russia. The composition that saw a Paris audience succumb to mob behavior at its premier has become a familiar, welcome presence to symphony audiences.

Of course, that says more about the hoi polloi than it does about music or musicians. In general, people buy tickets to performances that will be pretty much like what yesterday’s performance was. In general, the people ain’t anywhere near as interested in the avant-garde as they were in new coke.

It is the job of the organization that exists to support the BSO to bridge the gap between the avant-garde, eternal province of artists, and people in search of an entertaining distraction from the omnipresent breaking-news-scape.

Historically, that job in American was done by organizations dominated and run by republicans. Since the republican party has followed its nose for profit straight into the waste stream of consumerism, the arts in America are in transition, as is everything else. Naturally, the arts in America never will be without volunteers ready, willing, and able to make the professionals get the job done right!

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 4, 2024 performance – The same composer featured on today’s program in the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood also dominates the program that will conclude the season in three weeks, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827). That’s quite an accomplishment for someone who only published nine symphonies. While Tanglewood marks the end of the season with the beloved Symphony No. 9, today’s program included the least performed and most complained about of the 712 pieces he composed that were not symphonies.

Beethoven composed the rarely performed Concerto in C, for piano, violin, and cello, Opus 54 not for the joy of musical composition alone, but so that his patron (and piano student) would have a piece he was able to play. The addition of two more solo parts balanced the work by the relative complexity of the violin and cello parts. Today, the cello part of the triple concerto is considered to be the most difficult in the repertoire. Steven Isserlis was the cello soloist, with Joshua Bell on violin and Kirill Gerstein on piano, with Alan Gilbert conducting the BSO.

After intermission, on a sunny afternoon that followed a thunderstormy morning, was Symphony No. 4 in B-flat, Opus 60. Would that the weather didn’t so limit the audience, because if place/ambience play a part in the enjoyment of music, then Tanglewood is tailor-made for the presentation of Beethoven, no matter how good he sounds elsewhere.

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 2, 2024 performance – Boston Pops conductor emeritus John Williams was unable to attend the concert he prepared for performance in the Koussevitsky Music Shed. In his stead, David Newman joined guest conductor Ken-David Masur for a concert of music composed for Hollywood and TV. Maestro Newman is the son of famed composer Alfred Newman, whom Williams met at 23, to begin a lifetime friendship with the Newman family.

Half of the ten items on the program were composed by Maestro Williams, the balance by Korngold, North, Mancini, Bernstein (Lenny, not Elmer), and Raskin.

Early on, Maestro Masur, son of famed New York Philharmonic music director Kurt Masur, whose finale with the New Yorkers was here in the Shed in 2002, told us that Williams wants us to understand that film music is a genre in its infancy, compared to ancient classical music.

If so, then Tanglewood’s own John Williams qualifies for progenitor status in the emerging genre. Another way to look at it is to consider movie music the place where the art of orchestral composition meets the entertainment of motion pictures. Entertainment is like fastfood – it has to be the same in natural, upscale Nantucket as it is in beautiful, downtown Burbank.

The production of movies and TV is so expensive that financiers seldom back experimentation, the essential element of every work of art. Financed projects that produce big profits are likely to produce sequels, even prequels, so that no profit is left unharvested.

Tonight’s program includes a photo that shows the bust of Aaron Copland, in the Formal Garden at the eastern edge of the Tanglewood campus. It is yet another gift to us all from Maestro Williams, who already stands alongside Koussevitsky, Copland, Bernstein, and Ozawa in Tanglewood’s Inner Circle.

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 28, 2024 performance – When Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Andris Nelsons opened the second part of the program that would close the orchestra’s weekend celebration of the 150th anniversary of Serge Koussevitsky’s birth, he made a conductor’s decision that, in my mind, created a new work by the merging of two discrete compositions.

He cued the orchestra to begin Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms before the audience had time to applaud Randall Thompson’s Alleluia, which they were poised to greet with the great ovation it deserved. Composed at Koussevitsky’s request, for the 1940 inauguration of the Tanglewood (nee Berkshire) Music Center, it has been performed by every class since, at their opening exercises. Now held in Ozawa Hall, free and open to the public, they were held this year during the afternoon of the BSO’s opening night concert.

The six minute piece was performed after intermission, after the audience had already been thrilled by Aaron Copland’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, with soloist Paul Lewis. Copland stands near Koussevitsky in the inner circle of the Tanglewood pantheon. Today’s program includes a photo of the Copland bust that was commissioned by Boston Pops conductor emeritus John Williams, for placement in the formal garden at the eastern end of the sprawling Tanglewood campus.

My introduction to the piece came during Ozawapalooza, the weekend of farewell to Seiji Ozawa at the conclusion of his 29 year BSO tenure. On that sun-drenched but star-filled Sunday afternoon in the Shed, Maestro Ozawa led the massive audience in the most moving sing-along of all time. Souvenir copies of the sheet music had been distributed to the audience.

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 26, 2024 performance – Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Andris Nelsons chose, as the downbeat to the BSO’s Koussevitsky 150 Celebration weekend, the Tanglewood founder’s Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra, Opus 3, and Edwin Barker, the orchestra’s principal double bassist, as soloist. That must’ve felt especially gratifying to Barker, who is set to retire next spring.

No matter how intently I listened, as the the music filled the Shed and environs, I kept imagining the composer, as he conducts score upon score of violin, flute, and piano concerti, say to himself (soto voce), “double basses do it better!”

Maestro Koussevitsky (1874-1951) was soloist when the symphony was premiered in Moscow in 1905. Somehow, tonight marks its Tanglewood debut. Let’s hope there’s a more reasonable interval before it’s heard again in the Koussevitsky Music Shed, at the heart of Koussevitskyania, a.k.a. Tanglewood.

Oddly enough, the written word was elevated to the level of heard music for the pair of pieces performed post-intermission, The Origin of Fire, for baritone, male chorus, and orchestra, opus 32, by Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) and Prometheus, Poem of Fire, Opus 60, for piano, chorus, and orchestra, by Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915).

Over the heads of the orchestra hung a screen upon which first streamed text from the Finnish creation myth, Kalevala, then the more universal, but no less mythic, Prometheus poem.

Tonight’s program taught me not to be dismissive of the intrusion of text into what I hope and expect to be a sonorous, rather than a literary, occasion. That is because I followed along with much of the Finnish myth, and was delighted at its childlike innocence.

We are introduced to the wet nurse assigned to the care and feeding of the infant nation, informed that she “holds the ‘sparklet’ with confidence,” until she drops it, and it falls through nine protective levels before it splits the earth in two. That sure beats the myth of Columbus, the Pilgrims, and the new 1619 Myth recently proposed by the New York Times.

Yefim Bronfman was soloist for the concluding piece and James Burton conducted the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, which gets another star turn during the program on Sunday, to conclude the Koussevitsky celebration weekend. The chorus, an organization of amateurs, never fails to enrich the work of their seated, professional colleagues.

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 21, 2024 performance – There was something of an amateur hour on this bright Sunday afternoon in the Kousevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood, the summer home in the Berkshires of the Boston Symphoney Orchestra.

The program opened with Three Places in New England (Orchestral Set No. 1), composed by Charles Ives (1874-1954), an insurance executive who composed music for personal edification, rather than for pay, which puts the distinction between amateur and professional in sharp focus.

Symphony orchestras are historically republican institutions, none more so than the one in Boston, a town so conservative that it’s where the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and Cabots speak only to God. The program notes that accompany today’s program indicate that we owe a big debt of gratitude to the orchestra’s “resident avant-gardist,” Nicolas Slonimsky, whose friend Henry Cowell, another amateur composer, introduced him to Mr. Ives.

The amateur composer paid to have it performed in Cuba and Europe by the BSO, but the glorious composition, which pays better and more lasting tribute to the Berkshires than a barrel of p.r. professionals ever could, wasn’t performed here until 2007.

Since then, it has been performed several times by the BSO, and seems likely to every so often steal an afternoon or evening from the composer’s canonized European colleagues, thanks to the formerly republican BSO!

Local and global favorite, Emmanuel Ax was the guest soloist for the Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Opus 37, of Beethoven. Maestro Nelsons elicited beautiful performances all afternoon from the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra on a program that concluded with the famous tone poem of Richard Straus, Also sprach Zarathustra.