Tanglewood concert reviews

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 – James Taylor’s Fourth of July 2026 Tanglewood audience was rewarded for remembering their foul-weather gear. The weather didn’t get foul, just drizzly enough for a mess of bumbershoots to sprout across the crowded lawn. Mr. Taylor apologized from the Koussevitzky Music Shed stage, “sorry for the inconvenience, but we need to water the lawn now and then.”

Here’s a random sample of cell shots:

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.

By Dave Read, June 30, 2026 performance – If classical music resides within impermeable bounds, pop music lives inside a porous membrane that allows for one genre to blend with another, so that an audience may enjoy musical mulligatawny. Who knows where, why, or how such marriages are made, but the middle-of-the -road Boston Pops Orchestra now regularly shares the stage with the far-from-mainstream music of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead.

Not a few audience members danced in their seats, since heightened vigilance makes the aisles no-dance zones, inconceivable when America was run as a republic, by the people. The Shed was full and the late afternoon rain seemingly had no deleterious effect on the crowded law.

Even though I left my critical glasses home in favor of my summertime shades, I’m reminded of what Neil Young said to the acoustic engineer who was adjusting the balance on the massive speakers installed on his porch and open barn: “more barn!” I think added prominence to the orchestra would have enhanced tonight’s concert, which was plenty fun even so, even if dancers at their seats make better doors than windows!

By Dave Read, June 26, 2026 performance – Two weeks before the downbeat of the first Boston Symphony Orchestra program of the 2026 season at Tanglewood, 1979 Tanglewood fellow Wynton Marsalis led the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra through a program in the Koussevitzky Music Shed.

The concert was excellent as expected, but surprisingly brief, ending 65 minutes after it began. Maestro Marsalis introduced the concluding number just as a response to the show was beginning to unfold in my mind.

In retrospect, the program felt more like introductory recital than a concert. Each number flowed to its own end, with titles and solos called out, which made it feel serial, adding up to a sum, but not an organic whole, as jazz concerts do. Perhaps this show reflects the state of jazz, in the aftermath of a brighter time, when jazz was available all day long somewhere on FM radio, announced by well-informed deejays, who would also tell of dozens of gigs upcoming throughout the region.

Every part of every tune played tonight sounded as full and bright as could be, yet we expected something more. Earlier performances by Mr. Marsalis, leading various bands and combos, have always left us wanting more.

By Dave Read, June 21, 2026 performance – Tanglewood’s beautiful and versatile Ozawa Hall proved a fair haven for devotees of Yacht Rock, an unabashed nostalgia for a time not long ago, but which now feels like an ancient age.

My pop music memory reaches all the way to a time when church and civic halls hosted weekend dances for high school kids, with local bands blasting out covers of the latest hits heard over and over on the radio and American Bandstand. With such quaint things as free radio and TV relics of the ancient age, the Yacht Rock revue carries delicious youthfulness to patrons long since gone from high school.

Whereas the bands at my teenage dances had scant time to hone their chops and learn the new hit songs, the musicians who comprise the nearly twenty year old Yacht Rock Revue have their sets down pat and transition with seamless ease through ABBA, Steely Dan, Hall & Oates, Toto, Jackson Browne, Fleetwood Mac, and dozens more. And instead of sporting letter sweaters, the varsity in attendance today wore captain’s hats!