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Tanglewood 2025

Jon Batiste delights Tanglewood, June 28, 2025

By Dave Read, June 28, 2025 performance – Jon Batiste hosted a joy party on the second Saturday of summer 2025 at Tanglewood. Describing himself as a member the fourth generation of piano players in a family raised in the zydeco country of Lafayette, Louisiana, tonight’s show combined a large measure of call and response playfulness, with a more sublime measure of musical meditation.

Jon Batiste performs at the Tanglewood, June 28, 2025; Hilary Scott photo.
Jon Batiste performs at the Tanglewood, June 28, 2025; Hilary Scott photo.

If comparison of artists is always a perilous business, it is impossible not to be reminded of Louis Armstrong while Mr. Batiste performs. Both sons of the Crescent City, not only are they nonpareil musicians, but both smile(d) so brilliantly they make sadness scurry away. If anybody needs to see growth in the American character, see it in the fact that Mr. Batiste isn’t scorned for performing songs that enjoy widespread popularity, the way Satchmo was for including the likes of Hello Dolly in his setlists.

Batiste plays Beethoven

The only reason tonight’s setlist doesn’t qualify for a grammy-level award is because the music business has no imagination, but sees nothing beyond the bottom line. That Batiste sees beyond it is especially evident in the Beethoven part of tonight’s program. One piece, opening with the most familiar four notes in music that start Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, continued through variations on the ever familiar motif, before delivering it to an ecstatic resolution in Congo Square.

Batiste followed that with a strong but delicate reading of Fur Elise, the poignant bagatelle Beethoven composed to convey his unrequited love for an unknown Elise. And so our host excludes no primary emotion from the program, and thus makes room for full indulgence of our secondary appetite for play.

Early and late in the program were the ever popular Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and Oh When the Saints. There also was a number called Worship Drum Circle that spanned half an hour, but nobody was looking at their watches. If sheds had memories, then that number would have reminded the Koussevitsky Music Shed of Santana’s performance there in 1970!

2025 Prairie Home Companion at Tanglewood

By Dave Read, June 21, 2025 performance – An unrepentant Garrison Keillor returned to the hallowed ground of Tanglewood, where he fairly begged a pretty small audience to forgive the behavior that got him #MeToo’d out of the national audience that used to gather around the radio every Saturday at 6 p.m. to hear the news from Lake Wobegone.

Garrison Keillor with Heather Masse, Christine DiGallonardo, and Ellie Dehn; Hilary Scott photo.
Garrison Keillor with Heather Masse, Christine DiGallonardo, and Ellie Dehn; Hilary Scott photo.

Woe begone is he who is too deaf to hear NPR’s quasi-judicial verdict: “Hands off, old man!” When fellow Minnesota funny guy Al Franken got caught with his hands in the cookie jar, he was man enough to quit the Senate, even if we wish he hadn’t. Not so man-boy Keillor, whose tarnished brand lets him sell enough tickets to hire a band, radio actors, a sound-effects wizard, plus women to sing beside and with him.

We view the summary judgment of hashtags in the same light as we view the summary deportations of ICE. Keillor, however, proved the validity of accusations made against him when he devoted much of this show’s opening to joking about them. No innocent jokes either, he had the gall to assert that men only do what women make them do. He trotted out the Cupid defense, so full of himself that he can’t see how stupid that makes him look.

We started listening to the show early during the sleepwalk of Reagan’s presidency. In the mid-1990s, when Bertha’s Kitty Boutique, “For persons who care for cats,” was the program’s chief fake sponsor, we invented an aerosol spray called Air of the Dog, “for our friends who don’t care for cats.” One spray and cats ignore the insensitive (or allergic) friends and relatives who visit cat lovers.

I mailed my gag to the show and got a polite response along the lines of “Mr. Keillor likes your idea, but we write all material in-house.” Tonight, my idea finally made it’s way onto the show, such as it is. The freshest thing I heard was a promo for a fake product called Sandy’s Aerosol Sneakers, which emit an aroma designed to hide the smell of farts.

The host will claim the gag is based on real products in real stores, and maybe it is, but there’s no masking the odor emitted by some old farts. You’re welcome to the gag – here’s Pastor Ingqvist, he’ll see you home.

2000-2016 A Prairie Home at Tanglewood

Links to reviews of A Prairie Home Companion at Tanglewood between 2000-2016.