By Dave Read, July 5, 2025 performance – What’s old becomes new again when summer returns to the Berkshires, because, since FDR’s second term, the Boston Symphony Orchestra is in residence for eight weeks of musical rejuvenation at Tanglewood.

Callow youth (and inchoate adults) deem the music of long-dead composers to be an old thing, obsolete as thank you/you’re welcome. Let them escape their cells and un-bud their ears, let them sit in the antique, wooden seats of the ancient Koussevitsky Music Shed, while the BSO is in performance.
Some few will get it, and fall in love with the ineffable beauty of musical excellence, as it continually renews itself through the generations. Most won’t, alas, because their hearing has been calibrated to embrace the cacophony of calumny, such as gives the republicans another term to undo what the people accomplished through FDR’s stewardship.

Music can be as delicate as the sound of a feather fluttering to the ground and as bone-rattling as thunder on the horizon. It embraces and adorns the gamut of emotion while it invites us into its airy castle for an afternoon or an evening’s respite.
We who laid down our weary burdens and attended Maestro Andris Nelsons as he led the orchestra and soloist Daniil Trifonov through a program of Rachmaninoff to open the 88th Tanglewood season were richly rewarded, as if Calliope had new gifts to bestow.
The Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor is such a tour de force that it daunts even the greatest pianists; undaunted by it, however, is Daniil Trifonov, a 34 year old from Russia, whose performance tonight adds another coat to the Shed’s refulgent soul. This was an opportunity to thrill to the interplay of orchestra and soloist; whether it was Rachmanioff’s, or any composers, intent that they appear to be in competition, that is how it felt to me.
The orchestra opens by establishing a field of warmth, which the pianist right away races through, only to be caught and embraced by the whole ensemble. They establish that each is the equal of the other, and spend the better part of an hour in conversation. The language of music is far superior to our pedestrian tongues, which trip us into tiny, tiny pools of difference. I haven’t counted the nationalities represented in this year’s version of the BSO, but tonight, the sum of them, plus a Russian pianist and Latvian conductor added up to one.