By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 9, 2024 performance – Absent as nature has been from the positive side of promotion of outdoors entertainment in the Berkshires this Tanglewood season, on a rainy night, near the end of a rainy week, a small audience collected in the Koussevitsky Music Shed, where a concert of music was performed that sounded as good to me as if Calliope, Muse of Music, were in the house.
Empty seats in the three rows ahead gave me an unobstructed view of the Kirill Gerstein’s hands as he performed Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Minor, Opus 30. During one particularly busy passage, his hands were a blur, like you’d see in a Roadrunner cartoon. But the sound produced was anything but a blur – it was an increment of beauty that flowed into and out of the beautiful ocean of sound that pours from the orchestra.
After another passage, he soundlessly swept his hand along the keyboard, as a rider may pat his charger after a gallop. It is in the nature of nature to pull off such tricks as to equate a single instrument with several score of instruments, but that is what the concerto is all about. And this one of Rachmaninoff is considered to present pianists with the ultimate challenge, met so well tonight by Mr. Gerstein.
After intermission, the performance of a rarely performed piece was followed by the performance of a veritable war horse – Igor Stravinsky’s The Right of Spring, Pictures from pagan Russia. The composition that saw a Paris audience succumb to mob behavior at its premier has become a familiar, welcome presence to symphony audiences.
Of course, that says more about the hoi polloi than it does about music or musicians. In general, people buy tickets to performances that will be pretty much like what yesterday’s performance was. In general, the people ain’t anywhere near as interested in the avant-garde as they were in new coke.
It is the job of the organization that exists to support the BSO to bridge the gap between the avant-garde, eternal province of artists, and people in search of an entertaining distraction from the omnipresent breaking-news-scape.
Historically, that job in American was done by organizations dominated and run by republicans. Since the republican party has followed its nose for profit straight into the waste stream of consumerism, the arts in America are in transition, as is everything else. Naturally, the arts in America never will be without volunteers ready, willing, and able to make the professionals get the job done right!