Tanglewood 2025

By Dave Read, August 8, 2025 performance – Tonight’s performance at Tanglewood of Symphonie espagnole in D minor, for violin and orchestra by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andres Orozoco-Estrada with violin soloist Joshua Bell brought the composer, Edouard Lalo (1823-92), up from the depths of my musical ignorance to the first echelon of favorite composers.

The five-movement piece, written for a Spanish virtuoso friend of the composer, put both Mr. Bell and the BSO on full display of their own virtuosity. From the audience, one got a virtual workout merely following the sound around the orchestra as first this section then that one was emphasized.

I think there’s a tendency for a casual fine arts consumer such as myself to pay undue obeisance to subtlety and understatement. That stance was upset immediately tonight by the almost cartoonish open in Lalo’s symphony. It felt to me as if the composer wished to remind audiences that forthwith comes a big bright orchestra in concert with a spectacular violinist. Having gotten our attention in no uncertain tones, the orchestra and Mr. Bell carry us along for an exciting exploration of musical vertuosity.

After intermission, Maestro Orozoco-Estrada was vigorous in the orchestra’s thoroughly satisfying performance of Antonin Dvorak’s familiar Symphony No. 9 in E minor, From the New World. Written during the Czech composer’s New York sojourn at the National Conservatory of Music, the piece is informed by Dvorak’s affection for both native and African American music. His reputation for weaving motifs and themes from folk lore into his compositions led to the New York job, hoping to add American works to the orchestral canon.

By Dave Read, July 29, 2025 performance – Emmylou Harris and Graham Nash delivered a wonderfully entertaining evening of music in the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood, a venue they each first played fifty years ago. It was a treat to see and hear such seasoned performers in full command of the musical artistry that carried them to fame in the ’60s and ’70s.

Nash performed seated because of a recent fall in NYC – “but, I didn’t fall on my voice,” he said before leading his band through a set of fourteen songs, with an emphasis on his time with Crosby Stills and Nash + Young. Unlike so many aged performers whose insecurity spoils their stagecraft, Nash interspersed songs with amusing anecdotes. His band included the multi-instrumentalists Adam Minkoff and Zach Djanikian, and keyboardist Todd Caldwell.

If the performance of Mr. Nash and band was primarily a welcome and vigorous visit to earlier decades, Ms. Emmylou Harris’s set showed us that time has a way of standing still, as it appears to have for her. Wrapped in a cloud of white locks, she remains a presence as she did when introduced to the ages in the closing segment of The Last Waltz, singing Evangeline with The Band. Accompanied by her Red Dirt Band, which now includes John Prine’s bassist, Ms. Harris treated the audience to a survey of her diverse repertoire.

And she is an engaging hostess, telling of an early interest in theatre that involved Tanglewood and also referencing the Down East humor of Marshall Dodge, which got no reaction, sadly, because, among other reasons, the Berkshires ain’t quite Down East.

Graham Nash and Emmylou Harris at Tanglewood setlists, July 29, 2025.

Graham Nash
Wasted on the Way
Marrakesh Express
Military Madness
I Used to Be a King
Simple Man
Immigration Man
Love the One You’re With
Better Days
Bus Stop
Just a Song Before I Go
Our House
Encores: Teach Your Children, Woodstock,Suite: Judy Blue Eyes

Emmylou Harris

Birds – with Graham Nash
Easy from Now On
Orphan Girl
Making Believe
Red Dirt Girl
Gulf Coast Highway
One of These Days
Kern River
Right Now
Wheels
Ooh Las Vegas
Prayer in Open D
Michelangelo
Goin’ Back to Harlan
Together Again
Save the Last Dance for Me
Rose of Cimarron
Encore: Boulder to Birmingham

By Dave Read, July 26, 2025 performance – Already in its tenth decade, Tanglewood (est. 1937) has amassed no mean amount of lore and highlights, even if it has yet to erect a hall of fame. Whenever it does, there’ll be ample space in it for John Williams, whose contributions to the success and popularity of Tanglewood are both various and singular.

The highlight of tonight’s program was his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, dedicated to local favorite Emanuel Ax, who performed the world premier tonight, along with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of music director Andris Nelsons. As an indication of the breadth and fluidity of the composer’s imagination, the three movements of the concerto are inspired by the careers of three jazz pianists – Art Tatum, Bill Evans, and Oscar Peterson, each markedly distinct from the other! What looks on paper like a crazy idea, turns out to be a beautiful piece of music.

Maestro Williams was named conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra in 1980 and has been conductor laureate since 1993; the annual John Williams Film Night attracts as large an audience as the top classical soloists do; Mr. Williams’ gift of a bronze bust of Aaron Copland, first faculty leader of the Tanglewood Music Center, stands alone in the “formal garden,” waiting for busts of Koussevitsky, Bernstein, Ozawa, Williams and others to be commissioned and installed.

Yo-yo Ma premiered his Concerto for Cello at the opening of Ozawa Hall in 1994, and for Tanglewood’s 75th anniversary, in 2012, he composed Just Down West Street – on the left.

Sharing the bill tonight was Gustav Mahler, whose Symphony No. 1 in D was given a refulgent reading by the energized orchestra. It is a might work, with room for every sort of musical sound to be plumbed and made responsive to every other one. Maestro Nelsons, already in the second decade of his Tanglewood tenure, seems to be aging in reverse. We heard that he attributes a noticeable recent weight loss to Taekwando training; but together with such a martial bearing, there were stretches of tonight’s performance where it looked like he was leading a tai chi session!