Tanglewood concert reviews

By Dave Read, July 16, 2026 performance – The augmented Boston Camarata performed a program called, FREE AMERICA, Songs of Resistance and Rebellion for a sparse audience at Ozawa Hall, on the Tanglewood campus in the Berkshires. Led by France native Anne Azema and assisted by three fifers and a drummer, the ensemble delivered a beautifully arrayed survey of the songs and sounds of the American revolution.

The Boston Camerata was founded at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, during the apparent peace and quiet of 1954, when the new field of early music was emerging here and across Europe. Tonight’s performance was no staid museum piece, however, but a spirited re-animation of a varied and turbulent period.

The audience were invited several times to sing along and acquitted itself well. Early in the program, which Ms. Azema said was arranged into chapters, was Yankee Doodle, or the Lexington March. Perhaps the most affecting number was Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel, sung by bass baritone Philip Bullock, whose forceful performance temporarily transformed staid Ozawa Hall into a zealous temple.

Especially notable tonight also is drummer Kyle Forsthoff, who delighted the audience with a couple of turns on bones and spoons, which must be considered the most democratic of all instruments, (even if they are not easy to play well).

Tonight’s repertoire has roots as diverse as the nation they celebrate, ranging from the Hebrew Bible, Scottish taverns, slave quarters, and Shaker colonies. They comprise the first volume of American folk music, even if the music industry has mismanaged our national legacy, which is why such institutions as the Boston Camerata and the Tanglewood Music Center are so important.

By Dave Read, July 14, 2026 performance – Trombone Shorty and Ziggy Marley took possession of the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood tonight, the venue so recently under the dominion of Mozart, Mahler, Brahms, et al. And so we’re reminded of the alchemy that makes music serve both Mammon and the Muse, as either popular or classical art.

Whereas seduction is an essential element of most music, with listeners invited into realms of contrasting themes and rhythms, pop music often dispenses with the formalities and commands your attention from the downbeat. Trombone Shorty hits the ground running, a hip hop or funky rhythm throbbing aggressively. Dozens of trombone, trumpet, sax solos, and a few guitar runs comprise the show. It purely performative, a demonstration of amplification without ever feeling like an exchange between artist and audience – despite the twenty or so times Mr. Shorty dropped Tanglewood into his stream of verbiage or lyric.

It was fun but could have been so much more. These are highly skilled musicians but the performance overwhelmed their artistry with maximum volume devoted to a minimum of subtlety or variety.

Ziggy Marley dialed it back to a noticeable degree but didn’t take to the stage until thirty minutes after Trombone Shorty’s ninety minute set. That makes for too long a night – it’s sub-optimal to prepare for an evening of rhythmically fluid reggae music with an hour and a half of hip hop and neo-funk. Each headliner is a gifted musician and generous entertainer but something is lost, not added, when they are presented is succession.

Wouldn’t it be more fun to have Trombone Shorty headline a bill that opens with one or two jazz-centric emerging artists and on another date, present Ziggy Marley atop a bill that includes emerging artists of his ilk?

By Dave Read, July 12, 2026 performance – Guest conductor Fabio Luisi led pianist Eric Lu and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a Tanglewood matinee program of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No, 2 in F minor and Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 in D. Maestro Luisi’s principle job is music director of the Dallas Symphony

The program opened with a ten minute composition titled What do flowers do at night? by Sophia Jani, preceded by a little talk by Ms. Jani. It seems to me that the moment before a musical performance is best used to quiet ourselves, by escaping the verbose mind and embracing the sensuous mind. That trip from one side of the mind to the other can be arduous and time-consuming! I can listen to a composition, and I can listen to a talk about a composition, but I cannot do both at once. The time to explain a work of art is after it has been heard or seen, not before.

Winner of the first prize at the 2025 Chopin Piano competition in Prague, Mr. Lu gave an exciting and beautiful reading of Chopin’s concerto, in his Tanglewood debut. The ostensible imbalance between soloist and orchestra always makes it especially fun to listen closely and this afternoon I was rewarded when it seemed as if the string sections grew out of Mr. Lu’s left and right hands, so subtle were the segues between soloist and orchestra. After a rousing ovation, Mr. Lu returned to the piano and played an encore, Kinderszenen, Op. 15 No. 7: Träumerei, by Robert Schuman.

Following intermission, Maestro Luisi and the orchestra gave an elegant reading of the Brahms symphony, added to the long history of idyllic Berkshires afternoons at Tanglewood.

By Dave Read, July 11, 2026 performance – Maestro Andris Nelson led the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a pair of acclaimed soloists in a program of Mozart and Mahler to the delight of a large audience at Tanglewood.

Tonight’s program opened with Berkshires resident and global music citizen Emanuel Ax playing Mozart’s Piano concerto no. 25 in C, K.503. As program annotator Michael Sternberg notes, “This is one of Mozart’s big trumpets-and-drums concertos…,” which means it was easier than usual for me to pay attention and keep from wandering off the musical path. Once big orchestral sounds set us afoot, there’s no better guide through vast symphonia than the piano, which Mr. Ax has long since mastered.

After intermission, Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 in G, with soprano Erin Morley as soloist, was a perfect compliment to the piano concerto. The composer’s intentions for the symphony were out of sync with the audience’s response. Over time, audiences have caught up to Mahler’s vision. We mortals are well-represented by Ms. Morley’s sublime soprano, which this symphony finally locates in heaven!

Throughout the long national nightmare since Ford’s pardon of Nixon, Tanglewood has been a place of refuge, because music offers an escape from the gravity of populism. We, the people are served by music when musicians are free to serve their muse. Composers such as Mozart and Mahler were served by aristocratic patrons of the arts who left artistic alignment in the hands of artists. If the organization created to serve the orchestra thinks the orchestra is meant to serve the myriad cohorts collectively known as Boston, then it has lost its way.

Clearly, Maestro Nelsons and the myriad of musicians tuned tonight to his baton, are in perfect alignment.

By Dave Read, July 5, 2026 performance – Symphony No. 15, Lincoln, composed by Philip Glass was given its world premiere by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood, heading a program that continued with John Williams‘ suite from the film Lincoln, and concluded with Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait. Mr. Glass was given a rousing welcome by the large audience when he was brought on stage by conductor Karen Kamensek.

The program was harmonious and cumulative with its discrete components combining in one grand conclusion, rather than a trio of finales. Such is the result when great musicians devote their genius to the same beloved national martyr, as if their personal muses had united (across the decades). Mr. Glass aptly wove text and music in his composition, and baritone Zachary James added a rich resonance to the score.

Mr. Glass tells us in the notes for today’s program that this is his fourth composition centered on Abraham Lincoln, dating to the early 1980s. With a commission from the Hearthland Foundation, Symphony No. 15 was composed between 2021 and 2023, because Lincoln is “…an appropriate subject to consider on this, our country’s 250th birthday.”

“Opera is a species of theatre, not a place for a history lesson. When writing a symphony, we are talking about a relationship made even more abstract.”

The sensuous flow of music and lyric are interrupted by the digital crawl projected on the big device suspended over the orchestra. It awakens the text-centric intellect, which people hope to escape during a concert. Lose the crawl and let the music do the talking!

By Dave Read, July 4, 2026 performance – Music has charms to soothe the savage breast, according to William Congreve, who went on to say that it also softens rocks and bends knotted oak. It is dual savegery James Taylor soothes with music, personal and universal.

Mother nature savages everybody when it exiles us from the garden of childhood into the wilderness of adulthood. Not infrequently, those unsettling transitions lead people to over-indulge intoxicants, some to everlasting darkness, many others into the light of recovery.

An American spirit of evangelism inspires James Taylor to share the prose and poetry of his own salvation, his own fall and recovery, even if it is unlikely that an alcoholic or an addict is going to be introduced to the happy possibility of life without drink or dope at a place like Tanglewood or the Hollywood Bowl. That is why professional evangelists usually set up shop deep downtown, near the bus depot and highway underpass.

Mr. Taylor is a nimble guitar player gifted with a tenor voice clear and strong as a roaring brook. He jokes about writing the same ten songs twenty times and acknowledges the stroke of luck that pinned his star to the comet of The Beatles.

He respects the anonymity of the institution behind the lines in Sweet Baby James that always evoke a roar of local pride from the Tanglewood audience when they hear the hallowed proper nouns, Stockbridge and Berkshires.

But there was a disquieting sound from tonight’s show, a loud rolling roar elicited by his quip, I miss Richard Nixon. Just last week J.D. Vance inaugurated a campaign to exonerate the original felon-in-chief when he said, “If it happened today, Watergate would vanish in the flux of a twelve-hour news cycle.”

As designer of the “unitary executive” fallacy that allows Trump to run amok, there’s nothing funny about Nixon, nor can we rest easy with him in the grave. The second civil war is well underway; like Fort Sumter, 9/11, and Jan6, Nixon must never be joked about.

It would numb me to know the people have grown that dumb, have been addled by lie after lie after lie – by the hangover after glittering sights and sonorous sounds are allowed to trump the stark reality of common sense.