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By Dave Read (July 24, 2022 concert) – BSO music director Andris Nelsons led another diverse program on a sweltering, sunny afternoon in the Berkshires. The first piece, In Memoriam: The Colored Soldiers Who Died for Democracy, was composed by William Grant Still in 1944, at the request of the League of Composers.

As you’d expect, it is an evocative, sombre piece, which “…closes on a note of resoluteness but not resolution…as if to indicate that the struggle was only just beginning.” Within a few years, the armed forces of the United States was no longer segregated by race.

The second selection, Lilacs, for voice and orchestra, amounted to a star turn for soprano Latonia Moore, today making her BSO/Tanglewood debut. A commission by the BSO, George Walker composed the score as a setting for Walt Whitman’s poem, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, which itself mourns the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

Whitman is more than a mere poet – he is a prime mover of American poetry, the poetry of the new world, which represents an about-face from British and old world poetry. (There, the arts are patronized by the Crown and her nobles; here, the artist patronizes the people and nature.)

Whereas a musical adaption of Whitman, even if by a composer on par with Beethoven or Mozart, is bound to be problematic, there is no problem at all with the voice and artistry of Ms. Moore. She sang such big, rich lines that – well, I am resisting the temptation to say that her voice contains multitudes!

A walk on the Lawn at intermission inspired us to remain there, for the welcome breeze blowing off Stockbridge Bowl, for the Piano Concerto No. 2 by Johannes Brahms, with soloist Seong-Jin Cho. Notwithstanding the felicity of seats in the Koussevitsky Music Shed, and intimate proximity to the orchestra and soloists, it felt as if Brahms had composed his famous and beloved concerto to be consumed with the greater proximity to nature afforded by a place on the lawn.

We sit so close to each other inside auditoria that the little incidental noises of our seatmates can disturb our reveries and detract ever so slightly from the enjoyment of a musical selection. On Tanglewood’s vast lawn, however, those little noises are soaked up by the quiet woosh of the breeze that seems to heighten the reverie induced by the soloist and orchestra. A native of Seoul, Mr. Cho came to the concert world’s attention when he won the Chopin competition in 2016, and will release his recording of today’s piece later this year.

The Berkshires are rightly famous far and wide for splendid fall foliage; fans of cheap thrills are well-advised to stop in Lenox during May, when the town’s more subtle beauty is available for daylong meditation. It just so happens that annual sentiment has turned up in a poem, too: Judging April.

We may be witness to the Berkshires becoming a pleasant place of bucolic charm. If so, we’ll be glad of it – something about the long, hard rain of the GE era took the will out of the citizenry – it grew more submissive to the whim and demand of the Dollar, generation after generation, until we’re on the verge of converting land in Lee – “Gateway to the Berkshires” into a truly world-class PCB dump!

The lunacy of organizing people around consumption – rather than production is enough to blow your mind. Mothers and fathers pour their children into a school system designed to produce people with dreams, hopes, and aspirations so low that they will be happy to be of service to consumers. There ought to be a law!

The Boston Symphony Orchestra on Sunday, April 26, at 3 p.m., will launch Heroic Performances, a new 8-week video series of BSO and Boston Pops concerts for complimentary on-demand viewing at bso.org/athome. The first stream will feature BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons leading the BSO and pianist Yefim Bronfman in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor on a program with Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé, Suite No. 2, a BSO signature work for more than a century.
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Also scheduled for the first month:

• May 3: Seiji Ozawa, in his final Symphony Hall concert as BSO Music Director (April 20, 2002), leading Mahler’s Symphony No. 9;
• May 10: Erich Leinsdorf (BSO Music Director, 1962-69) conducting Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 (recorded in Symphony Hall, April 15, 1969);
• May 17: Andris Nelsons, in his inaugural concert as BSO Music Director, leading operatic excerpts by Wagner, Puccini, Mascagni, with guest vocalists Kristine Opolais and Jonas Kaufmann (recorded in Symphony Hall, September 27, 2014).