Tanglewood schedule – week four – July 24-30, 2009

The fourth week of the Tanglewood this season, James Levine’s last, will have him conducting three major programs. On July 24, Maestro Levine leads Berlioz’s Le Corsaire Overture and Harold in Italy, with BSO principal violist Steven Ansell, on a program with the Prelude to Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina and the dramatic Pictures at an Exhibition (orchestrated by Ravel).

Last fall’s Symphony Hall performance of Brahms’s A German Requiem, will be reprised July 25, with Finnish soprano Soile Isokoski and German baritone Matthias Goerne, along with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus.

On July 26 and 27, Levine conducts the Tanglewood Music Center Vocal Fellows and Orchestra, with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, in a fully-staged production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, sung in Italian with English supertitles. There also wiil be a third performance on July 29, led by a Tanglewood Music Center Conducting Fellow.

Scheduled for July 26 is conductor David Robertson and the BSO along with baritone Thomas Hampson and pianist Orli Shaham for an all-American program, Harris’s Symphony No. 3, Thomson’s Five Songs from William Blake, Barber Songs with Orchestra, and Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety.

James Levine, Keith Lockhart, John Williams, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, and Leonard Slatkin share the podium on Tuesday July 28 for the annual Tanglewood on Parade. They will take turns conducting the BSO, the TMCO, and the Boston Pops on a program highlighted by a TMCO performance of the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, programmed in honor of Leonard Bernstein’s 90th birthday year. Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture followed by a dazzling fireworks display ends the day-long celebration of music and TMC fund-raiser (and unofficial fancy picnic championship).

On July 30, Sir James Galway gives an Ozawa Hall recital joined by his wife, flutist Lady Jeanne Galway, and longtime collaborator, pianist Phillip Moll as part of his 70th birthday celebration, .