Tanglewood concert reviews

By Dave Read, Aug. 20, 2026 performance – The tumultuous 2026 Tanglewood season of the Boston Symphony Orchestra closed with a magnificent performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor, led by guest conductor Gustavo Gimeno The outstanding performance of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus also featured a guest conductor Jean-Sebastien Vallee.

Such a program as today’s is the perfect way to conclude the classical music season in the bucolic Berkshires. Tanglewood founder Serge Koussevitzky and Ludwig van Beethoven seem like kindred spirits, each profoundly attached to the earthy world of mortals as well as to the ethereal world of music.

The myriad of musical tones produced during a performance of this symphony – surely one of the world’s favorites, seem to be the expression of the dense, fecund landscape where Maestro Koussevitzky established his summer music school and performance venue. Our civilization was largely formed by the Europe that produced Beethoven and Koussevitzky, who said his decision to establish a training academy and performance venue in the Berkshires was because the locale reminded him of his homeland.

As prelude today was an excerpt from the German requiem by Brahms, “Blessed are they that mourn,” accompanied by piano four-hands with Julia Clarey and D.J. Cleavinger. The amateurs of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, many indicating their solidarity with their professional colleagues in the orchestra by wearing red rose boutonnieres, never fail to prove that the union of human voices in a choir is capable of sounds more satisfying and sublime than any manmade instrument or device ever could.

Resources for visitors to the Berkshires

Pages that may help you plan your visits to the Berkshires.

• Berkshires bus and Amtrak train schedules
• Towns & cities in the Berkshires
• Parks and recreation in the Berkshires

By Dave Read, Aug. 20, 2026 performance – The Silkroad Ensemble played a homecoming concert in Seiji Ozawa Hall on the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Tanglewood campus tonight, even if no talk about the big game was overheard in the bleachers.

Silk road is an ironic metaphor for international trade, which never was and never will be smooth as silk. The impetus at the foundation of the Ensemble is to celebrate international cooperation by remembering the music heard along the great silk road network that ran between the eastern and western worlds up through the Middle Ages.

Berkshireite and regular BSO guest cellist Yo-Yo Ma founded the Ensemble and led it’s debut concert in Ozawa Hall in 2000. In 2020, Rhiannan Giddens was named music director. Mr. Ma was born in Paris, moved with his family to Boston at age seven, then studied at Julliard and Harvard. Ms. Giddens was born in North Carolina and went to college there and at Oberlin in Ohio, before moving to Ireland.

It’s funny how these things play out – the trade route that gave the band its name has various names today, none more prominent than the Strait of Hormuz, upon which depends a significant portion of global commerce. Concerts by the Silkroad Ensemble can effect messy world affairs by their offer of refuge from them, so that we return to our struggles refreshed and invigorated.

We know that music hath charms to soothe the savage breast, but do we know also that music, like poetry, makes nothing happen?

I would argue that the highest function of music (and poetry) is to encourage estimable behavior in people who listen to music (and read poetry). Nobody can be made to be refreshed and invigorated by a musical performance, but the people who are so effected are the people we need involved in society, especially in politics.

Whereas Paris-born Yo-Yo Ma appears to have been thoroughly Americanized, the native North Carolinian Rhiannan Giddens cut her teeth on the traditional music of the African-American south, which befits her leadership of a band that celebrates the folk music that arose in the environs of the old silk road.

Tonight, we exited Ozawa Hall refreshed and invigorated because the music was so beautiful and because nothing remotely political was heard from the brilliant musicians of the Silkroad Ensemble.

Silkroad Ensemble personnel

• Rhiannon Giddens, Banjo, Viola, Vocals, and Artistic Director
• Yo-Yo Ma, Cello and Founder
• Kinan Azmeh, Clarinet
• Shawn Conley, Bass
• Sandeep Das, Tabla
• Haruka Fujii, Percussion
• Maeve Gilchrist, Celtic Harp
• Colin Jacobsen, Violin
• Wu Man, Pipa
• Karen Ouzounian, Cello
• Shane Shanahan, Percussion
• Mazz Swift, Violin and Vocals
• Francesco Turrisi, Accordion and Percussion
• Kojiro Umezaki, Shakuhachi
• Kaoru Watanabe, Japanese Flutes and Percussion

Tanglewood tickets and transportation to the Berkshires

For Tanglewood tickets and other information, please visit the website of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Here is information on how to get to the Berkshires.

By Dave Read, Aug. 16, 2026 performance – It was a homecoming for Marin Alsop to conduct the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in one of their final performances; in 1989, she won the TMC’s Koussevitzky Conducting Medal, which she earned under the tutelage of Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, and Gustav Meier.

After fourteen years as Music Director, in 2021, Ms. Alsop became director laureate of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and in 2025 was awarded the Golden Baton from the League of American Orchestras.

As prelude to Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, Ms. Alsop led the orchestra in a performance of Anna Clyne’s Masquerade, which the composer describes in the program. “Masquerade draws inspiration from the original mid-eighteenth century promenade concerts held in London’s pleasure gardens.” As performed today, the piece was composed to both attract and hold onto the attention of pedestrians, regardless their original destination.

It served as a felicitous segue to Bruch’s concerto, another composition that commands the attention of an audience. Although the violin has been front and center at Tanglewood this season with a roster of all-star soloists, it may have found new heights of brilliance in the hands of Ray Chen, in his Tanglewood debut today.

No better accompaniment to the balance of a summer afternoon than Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, which was given a sublime reading by the Tanglewood fellows today. Comprised of five movements and without a choral element, the piece lends itself to such a valedictory-type performance, as it was also featured in 2023, with Andris Nelsons conducting.

Tanglewood tickets and transportation to the Berkshires

For Tanglewood tickets and other information, please visit the website of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Here is information on how to get to the Berkshires.

By Dave Read, Aug. 9, 2026 performance – As stormy as Saturday was, with thunder and lightning precluding picnics on the lawn and the sprinkle of political posturing over the concert in the Shed, Sunday was an ideal day to arrive early and soak in the naturally soothing atmosphere produced by Tanglewood when the podium is commanded by artists, not managers and marketers.

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For Tanglewood tickets and other information, please visit the website of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Here is information on how to get to the Berkshires.

By Dave Read, Aug. 4, 2026 performance – A miscellany of music and talk was on the bill tonight in a program called We, the People, an American Journey at Tanglewood. In addition to the Boston Symphony Orchestra, on stage in the Koussevitzky Music Shed were conductors Teddy Abrams and Ken-David Masur, musicians and speakers Yo-Yo Ma, Aoife O’Donovan, Jennifer Kreisberg, James Taylor, Jon Batiste, Heather Cox Richardson, and Bryan Stevenson.

Whereas a typical Tanglewood concert includes the work of one, two, or three composers, the music tonight is the work of thirteen musicians; E pluribus unum to the max! Fittingly, Tanglewood Music Center founding father Aaron Copland had two compositions on the bill, the opening Fanfare for the Common Man and the closing fanfare from his Symphony No. 3.

In between were compositions by “music warrior for Native equity and parity,” Brent Michael David, Stephan Foster, Antonin Dvorak, Copland protege Leonard Bernstien, John Knowles Paine, and Julia Wolfe. Diana Wyenn was director and dramaturg, which Mr. Webster tells us is a specialist in the art or technique of dramatic composition and theatrical representation.

For Tanglewood tickets and other information, please visit the website of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Here is information on how to get to the Berkshires.

By Dave Read, Aug. 4, 2026 performance – A subsequent committment prevented us from attending the gala concert this evening, so the scope of this report is limited to a stroll amid the many musical performances provided by the Boston Symphony Orchestra during the afternoon of Tanglewood on Parade, which is at the center of the BSO’s annual local fund-raising efforts.

Following a week or so of less-than-ideal weather, August 4th was as glorious a summer day in the Berkshires as could reasonably be hoped for. Within a span of less than an hour, and withing a radius of a thousand yards, there was a Tanglewood Music Center piano recital in Ozawa Hall, an audience sing-along with TMC vocal fellow in Studio E of the Linde Center, a Boston University Tanglewood Institute chorus and orchestra concert in the Koussevitzky Music Shed, and a veritable hoedown with BSO violinist Bonnie Berwick and Friends on the Tappan House porch!

For Tanglewood tickets and other information, please visit the website of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Here is information on how to get to the Berkshires.