By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 26, 2024 performance – Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Andris Nelsons chose, as the downbeat to the BSO’s Koussevitsky 150 Celebration weekend, the Tanglewood founder’s Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra, Opus 3, and Edwin Barker, the orchestra’s principal double bassist, as soloist. That must’ve felt especially gratifying to Barker, who is set to retire next spring.
No matter how intently I listened, as the the music filled the Shed and environs, I kept imagining the composer, as he conducts score upon score of violin, flute, and piano concerti, say to himself (soto voce), “double basses do it better!”
Maestro Koussevitsky (1874-1951) was soloist when the symphony was premiered in Moscow in 1905. Somehow, tonight marks its Tanglewood debut. Let’s hope there’s a more reasonable interval before it’s heard again in the Koussevitsky Music Shed, at the heart of Koussevitskyania, a.k.a. Tanglewood.
Oddly enough, the written word was elevated to the level of heard music for the pair of pieces performed post-intermission, The Origin of Fire, for baritone, male chorus, and orchestra, opus 32, by Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) and Prometheus, Poem of Fire, Opus 60, for piano, chorus, and orchestra, by Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915).
Over the heads of the orchestra hung a screen upon which first streamed text from the Finnish creation myth, Kalevala, then the more universal, but no less mythic, Prometheus poem.
Tonight’s program taught me not to be dismissive of the intrusion of text into what I hope and expect to be a sonorous, rather than a literary, occasion. That is because I followed along with much of the Finnish myth, and was delighted at its childlike innocence.
We are introduced to the wet nurse assigned to the care and feeding of the infant nation, informed that she “holds the ‘sparklet’ with confidence,” until she drops it, and it falls through nine protective levels before it splits the earth in two. That sure beats the myth of Columbus, the Pilgrims, and the new 1619 Myth recently proposed by the New York Times.
Yefim Bronfman was soloist for the concluding piece and James Burton conducted the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, which gets another star turn during the program on Sunday, to conclude the Koussevitsky celebration weekend. The chorus, an organization of amateurs, never fails to enrich the work of their seated, professional colleagues.