Tanglewood schedule July 5 – 10, 2014
Article by Dave Read
Week 1 on the 2014 Tanglewood schedule is highlighted by the BSO’s Opening Night at Tanglewood on July 5 with an all-American program starring soprano Renee Fleming singing works of the American concert hall and opera stage, plus favorites from musical theater and popular genres. Israeli conductor Asher Fisch leads the orchestra in a Shed concert on Sunday, July 6 with pianist Garrick Ohlsson. The program includes orchestral excerpts from Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and Liszt’s tone poem Les Préludes.
Opening Night at Tanglewood Saturday, July 5, 2014
- Saturday, July 5, 8:30 p.m. Shed
- Opening Night at Tanglewood
- Boston Symphony Orchestra
- Renée Fleming, soprano
Sunday, July 6, 2:30 p.m. Shed
- Boston Symphony Orchestra,
- Asher Fisch, conductor
- Garrick Ohlsson, piano
- BRAHMS – Piano Concerto No. 2
- LISZT – Les Préludes
- WAGNER – Excerpts from Die Meistersinger
Wednesday, July 9, 8 p.m. Ozawa Hall
- Chanticleer
- She Said/He Said
On Wednesday, July 9, Chanticleer comes to Ozawa Hall with a program called She Said/He Said. The complex and emotionally charged dialogue between the sexes is an eternal theme for composers, from the bawdiest Renaissance madrigals through standards by Cole Porter. In another vein, godliness bestowed upon women is extolled in works by Andrea Gabrieli and Eric Whitacre. She Said/He Said will feature female voices as diverse as Hildegard von Bingen and Stacy Garrop, German Romanticism from Brahms and Fanny Mendelssohn, and songwriting by Joni Mitchell. The program will conclude with newly created arrangements contributing fresh material to Chanticleer’s popular and jazz repertoire.
In an extended concert with two intermissions on Thursday, July 10, the eminent Emerson String Quartet provides the rare opportunity to hear the last five of Shostakovich’s string quartets in a single evening. The selected quartets are Nos. 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15, all composed in the Cold War-era USSR between 1966 and 1975.
Thursday, July 10, 7:30 p.m. Ozawa Hall
- Emerson String Quartet
- SHOSTAKOVICH Quartets Nos. 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15
- This is an extended concert with two intermissions.
Friday, July 11, 6 p.m. Ozawa Hall, Prelude Concert, Members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra
Friday, July 11, 7:15 p.m. Shed. This Week at Tanglewood Panel discussion with moderator Martin Bookspan and guest artists.
Friday, July 11, 8:30 p.m. Shed
On July 11, Andris Nelsons makes his first Tanglewood appearances since being named the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s music director designate on a program with German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter. It will be an all-Dvorak program including the Violin Concerto, the pastoral and tuneful Symphony No. 8, and the rarely performed 1896 symphonic poem The Noonday Witch.
Friday, July 11, 8:30 p.m. Shed
- Boston Symphony Orchestra
- Andris Nelsons, conductor
- Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin
- ALL-DVO?ÁK PROGRAM
- The Noonday Witch
- Violin Concerto
- Symphony No. 8
On July 12, Maestro Nelsons leads a dance-inspired gala performance featuring both the BSO and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra. He leads the TMCO in excerpts from Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier in the first half of the program, with sopranos Sophie Bevan and Angela Denoke and mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard. The second half features the BSO in Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances and Ravel’s Bolero. 
On Wednesday, July 23, New York-based orchestra The Knights, a unique and flexible ensemble featuring musicians and composers from diverse musical backgrounds that expands and contracts to accommodate the variety of music it performs, performs in Ozawa Hall. The program features Maria Schneider’s Winter Morning Walks, for soprano, jazz musicians, and strings, and transcriptions for trumpet and ensemble of songs by Joni Mitchell, Kurt Weill, Michel Legrand, and Astor Piazzolla. Soloists include soprano Dawn Upshaw, trumpetist Håkan Hardenberger, pianist Frank Kimbrough, clarinetist Scott Robinson, and bassist Jay Anderson. 
There is more opera on Thursday, July 31, when the Chamber Ensemble from the Boston Lyric Opera Orchestra comes to Ozawa Hall for an evening of American opera. Led by conductor David Angus and featuring sopranos Chelsea Basler and Caroline Worra, mezzo-soprano Heather Johnson, tenor Omar Najmi, and baritones David McFerrin and Daniel Mobbs, the ensemble performs Jack Beeson’s 1965 opera Lizzie Borden about the infamous 1892 Fall River, Massachusetts, double axe murder. The work will be performed without intermission and sung in English with supertitles in a new chamber version created for the Boston Lyric Opera.
Audience favorite Tanglewood on Parade, Tuesday, August 5, gives audiences a chance to hear BSO, the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, and the Boston Pops perform in a single concert, followed by fireworks over the Stockbridge Bowl. Leonard Slatkin and Stephane Deneve are joined by Boston Pops Conductor Keith Lockhart, and Laureate Conductor John Williams for a program that will include the traditional TOP finale, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. 
Pianist Jeremy Denk gives an Ozawa Hall recital Wednesday, August 13, for a program of Ives’s Sonata No. 2, Concord, and Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra comes to Ozawa Hall on Thursday, August 14, for a performance of Handel’s 1713 opera seria Teseo, led by early music specialist Nicholas McGegan. The cast includes sopranos Amanda Forsythe, Amy Freston, Dominique Labelle, and Céline Ricci; countertenors Robin Blaze and Drew Minter; and baritone Jeffrey Fields.