By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 13, 2023 performance – Berkshire county’s favorite adopted son and one of the world’s most popular musicians, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, was substituted because of Covid on today’s program by the beloved soprano and frequent Tanglewood guest artist, Renée Fleming. That today’s program was put together virtually overnight is testament to the devoted professionalism of all involved, but especially Ms. Fleming and Maestro Nelson, who combined to flood the Koussevitsky Music Shed and lawn with the sounds of beautiful music.
Resplendent in jewels and a gown of spring green hues, Ms. Fleming appears intent to satisfy our vision as much as her singing will reward our listening. But, this is an instance where costume is a mere courtesy; from the instant we hear her voice, the visual plane becomes utterly irrelevant.
Irrelevant also is whether the audience understands German or has any clue about what the poems mean, for which Richard Strauss composed such gorgeous settings. Nontheless, electronic supertitles crawl thirty feet over the heads of the orchestra, for anybody who wishes to ground the soaring sounds made by Ms. Fleming in literal sense!
When set to music and sung, words transition into being vehicles for the conveyance of sound rather than of sense, as they are in print; their literal meaning becomes subordinate to the sounds produced by their singers.
After intermission, Maestro Nelsons led the orchestra in a lively reading of the 1947 version of Petrushka, the ballet composed by Igor Stravinsky in 1911 for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The orchestra opened the program with a reprise of a piece premiered here last year, Julia Adolphe’s Makeshift Castle.