Tanglewood 2025

By Dave Read, July 13, 2025 performance – The Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted today by Thomas Ades, substituting for Esa Pekka-Salonen, performed a program highlighted by the Sibelius Violin concerto in D minor, Opus 47, with soloist Pekka Kuusisto. Tumblebird Contrails composed by Gabriella Smith opened the program, which concluded with the Sibelius Symphony no. 5 in E-flat cl;osed it.

The concert hall, during a performance by a symphony orchestra, becomes a place where the dividing distinctions of verbal language will vaporize and disappear, if we are able to stem the flow of words between our ears. Then, the universal language of music can flood in, and have its way with us.

Despite many such visits to concert halls, the composer’s art baffles me – I’m as mystified by the vocabulary, grammar, and diction of musical composition as I am by telekinesis. But I know what I like, and there’s not much, in musical or verbal language, that I like more than the Sibelius Violin concerto in D minor, Opus 47.

There’s an equality in excellence, or, at least a disinclination to impose a dividing hierarchy on favorite compositions. But what’s the harm in speculation? If told my ears would fall off in twenty minutes, I’d cue up the final movement of this piece. There’s something brutally honest about it; it’s music at its most basic, melody imposed on rhythm – and though it holds together as a bar of bullion does, every second brings more new sounds.

So passes another summer Sunday at Tanglewood, the magical place named by one of America’s first verbal artists, Nathaniel Hawthorne. What was an unhappy term of exile for him has grown into the veritable haven of harmony for multitudes seeking temporary refuge from the cacophony of our upheaved political reality.

By Dave Read, July 11, 2025 performance – And now for something entirely different! Romeo and Juliet: A Theatrical Concert for Orchestra was on the bill tonight at Tanglewood’s Koussevitsky Music Shed, where the enthusiastic reaction from the audience indicates it was a big hit. BSO music director Andris Nelsons conducted the orchestra, Bill Barclay adapted and directed the theatrics.

At the core of the program was Romeo & Juliet, Opus 64, a ballet composed by Sergei Prokofiev, during the years when Stalin interfered with the arts in Russia the way a fugitive from justice does here.

This was amusing, light entertainment; with Shakespeare’s text reduced to the essential action of the doomed love story. Most of the best-known lines were kept, but heard only with some difficulty, partly due to acoustics but mostly because the actors employed a more conversational tone than a declamatory one, which I feel would have suited the setting better.

The theatrical part, itself, was a component of the very big, bright, orchestral conversation. I would think, therefore, that the spoken, textual parts should be leaned into as if they were instrumental solos – so that it plays like a theatrical concerto.

The program notes mention that the unhappy ending of Shakespeare’s play made it unacceptable to the dictates of “Soviet Realism,” where every ending must be a happy one. Informed the censors wouldn’t approve the Bard’s scenario, a determined Prokofiev responded by having Romeo appear a minute before Juliet’s demise, saying “Living people can dance, but the dead cannot dance lying down.”

Although we’re living under another terrible reign, one unfazed by death, whether in Gaza, Ukraine, or Texas, neither lover died tonight, even though both swallowed poison!

By Dave Read, July 6, 2025 performance – Today’s program, the first matinee of the Tanglewood season, was an all-Beethoven one, performed mere hours after last night’s all-Rachmanioff program. Knowing that the season finale will be Beethoven’s Ninth, which we delight to exhaust all our powers of concentration on, and the weather being ideal, we enjoyed this concert on the lawn.

Such is the luxury of life in the Berkshires, that one can take a casual approach as one of the world’s best orchestra’s performs a couple hour’s worth of the best music ever composed!

Pianist Yefim Bronfman, a long-time favorite soloist at Tanglewood, delighted the audience with his performance of Beethoven’s Piano concerto in C minor. Called back for an encore, he played a piece by Rachmanioff.

To conclude the opening of the season, the rejuvenated BSO music director Andris Nelsons led a breathtaking rendition of Beethoven’s Fifth. Despite its familiarity, especially its ominous opening quartet of notes, which the composer described as “fate knocking at the door,” this performance felt like a brand new thing.

With a rapt audience contributing to a distraction-free ambiance on lawn, not only may one bask in the sunshine of an ideal summer afternoon, but also set the imagination afloat in a musical sea.