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.
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!