By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 21, 2024 performance – There was something of an amateur hour on this bright Sunday afternoon in the Kousevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood, the summer home in the Berkshires of the Boston Symphoney Orchestra.
The program opened with Three Places in New England (Orchestral Set No. 1), composed by Charles Ives (1874-1954), an insurance executive who composed music for personal edification, rather than for pay, which puts the distinction between amateur and professional in sharp focus.
Symphony orchestras are historically republican institutions, none more so than the one in Boston, a town so conservative that it’s where the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and Cabots speak only to God. The program notes that accompany today’s program indicate that we owe a big debt of gratitude to the orchestra’s “resident avant-gardist,” Nicolas Slonimsky, whose friend Henry Cowell, another amateur composer, introduced him to Mr. Ives.
The amateur composer paid to have it performed in Cuba and Europe by the BSO, but the glorious composition, which pays better and more lasting tribute to the Berkshires than a barrel of p.r. professionals ever could, wasn’t performed here until 2007.
Since then, it has been performed several times by the BSO, and seems likely to every so often steal an afternoon or evening from the composer’s canonized European colleagues, thanks to the formerly republican BSO!
Local and global favorite, Emmanuel Ax was the guest soloist for the Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Opus 37, of Beethoven. Maestro Nelsons elicited beautiful performances all afternoon from the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra on a program that concluded with the famous tone poem of Richard Straus, Also sprach Zarathustra.