Tanglewood 2025

By Dave Read, July 8, 2025 performance – Barenaked Ladies, the band from Canada, romped through an energetic set of the tunes that carried them to stardom during the Clinton presidency, including such numbers as “If I had a million dollars” and “Brian Wilson.” They are a quirky group of a band, rocking an acoustic double bass on many numbers as well as an accordion, the instrument that made Lawrence Welk popular.

As someone whose acoustic sensibility was calibrated during the 1960s, I’m an alien rather than a native member of the band’s audience, but much of it did recall the furious thunder of electric guitar, bass, and drums that characterized rock ‘n roll. After Cream and Jimi Hendrix, rock ‘n roll splintered into the many sub-genres of pop, where Barenaked Ladies now are beloved and respected elders of the MTV generation!

True to the maxim of Canadien politeness, not only did the Ladies namecheck Lenox merchants, but the bass player told the audience of his pilgrimage to the bust of Aaron Copland. He did it with such nonchalance that he must presume the audience even knows who Copland was, his connection to Tanglewood, or that John Williams commissioned the memorial of him situated on the far side of the Tanglewood campus. Good for him.

Earlier, Sugar Ray seemed to succeed in delivering an adequate dose of entertainment, but all I took away was their premature nostalgia, because most of the numbers they performed came at the end of wistful recollections of when they were hits.

By Dave Read, July 5, 2025 performance – What’s old becomes new again when summer returns to the Berkshires, because, since FDR’s second term, the Boston Symphony Orchestra is in residence for eight weeks of musical rejuvenation at Tanglewood.

Callow youth (and inchoate adults) deem the music of long-dead composers to be an old thing, obsolete as thank you/you’re welcome. Let them escape their cells and un-bud their ears, let them sit in the antique, wooden seats of the ancient Koussevitsky Music Shed, while the BSO is in performance.

Some few will get it, and fall in love with the ineffable beauty of musical excellence, as it continually renews itself through the generations. Most won’t, alas, because their hearing has been calibrated to embrace the cacophony of calumny, such as gives the republicans another term to undo what the people accomplished through FDR’s stewardship.

Music can be as delicate as the sound of a feather fluttering to the ground and as bone-rattling as thunder on the horizon. It embraces and adorns the gamut of emotion while it invites us into its airy castle for an afternoon or an evening’s respite.

We who laid down our weary burdens and attended Maestro Andris Nelsons as he led the orchestra and soloist Daniil Trifonov through a program of Rachmaninoff to open the 88th Tanglewood season were richly rewarded, as if Calliope had new gifts to bestow.

The Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor is such a tour de force that it daunts even the greatest pianists; undaunted by it, however, is Daniil Trifonov, a 34 year old from Russia, whose performance tonight adds another coat to the Shed’s refulgent soul. This was an opportunity to thrill to the interplay of orchestra and soloist; whether it was Rachmanioff’s, or any composers, intent that they appear to be in competition, that is how it felt to me.

The orchestra opens by establishing a field of warmth, which the pianist right away races through, only to be caught and embraced by the whole ensemble. They establish that each is the equal of the other, and spend the better part of an hour in conversation. The language of music is far superior to our pedestrian tongues, which trip us into tiny, tiny pools of difference. I haven’t counted the nationalities represented in this year’s version of the BSO, but tonight, the sum of them, plus a Russian pianist and Latvian conductor added up to one.

By Dave Read, July 4, 2025 performance – Like 48% of teenagers during the 1960s, James Taylor used a guitar as the sword and shield that would convey him from troubled adolescence into assured adulthood. Almost magically, his turned into a ticket to ride the Fab Four Express to unimaginable highs, and foreseeable lows.

Tonight’s show marks 51 years since he made his Tanglewood debut, which came six years after The Beatles made him the first American to carry their brand into the pop music marketplace. The Apple LP James Taylor was a critical success but a marketplace flop because he wasn’t able to tour widely in support of it, needing instead to retreat in support of himself.

During the first fifty years, the most memorable audience reaction always followed mention of Stockbridge and the Berkshires in Sweet Baby James. Tonight however, the audience’s delight in the local namechecks sounded like a whisper compared to the roar of hatred that erupted when Taylor said “no kings” after saying that You’ve Got a Friend was written for him by Carole King. It was a frightening eruption of mass hatred, an example of how mobs behave.

It was a display of the same energy that powered Jan. 6, which means that it is precisely the opposite of the Common Sense that powered the American Revolution 249 years ago. Pop music isn’t meant to power politics or do anything besides allow people momentary retreat from an increasingly troubled world.

But maybe things are upside down now in America. Maybe the populism Trump incubated for fifteen years in the popular medium of TV, then rode populism’s rude mob into the White House, twice, means that only anti-Trump pop idols have meaningful political power today. It has been a frighteningly long time since anybody has wielded a popular pen in pursuit of honest political purpose.

And tonight, our rare pop idol hinted that his own swan song is imminent. Would that he put that power to good use; it must shock him every time he says “no kings.” Our founders left unharmed their royal nemesis, but they took care to defeat his armed forces. The only takeaway from this concert is that the people are starved for leadership. Pop stars can lead their mobs of fans to troughs of reason, but can they make them reasonable?