Article updated July 27, 2019 by Dave Read
Tanglewood on Parade took place on the penultimate Tuesday of July, only the second time this millennium that it hadn’t been scheduled for the first Tuesday in August. Since a good surmise is available, we’ll dispense with the transmission of a query up the media affairs ladder: the Maestro made it happen so he could participate, before returning to Europe for an August full of projects and programs?
This is the BSO’s big fundraiser during Tanglewood, so, of course the music director should play a key role in the event, which includes a full afternoon of recitals and performances throughout the sprawling Tanglewood campus.
The evening concert is a spectacle of orchestras/choirs and conductors – four of each: Andris Nelsons and the BSO, Keith Lockhart with the Boston Pops, James Burton and the Boston Symphony Children’s Choir, Thomas Wilkins and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra. Providing a preview of the massive Wagner weekend following, Nelsons led the BSO in “The Ride of the Valkyries.”
For the grand finale, which culminates in mortar fire and pyrotechnics, Thomas Wilkins leads the combined orchestras in the endlessly renewable 1812 Overture, Tchaikovsky’s paean to a forgotten Imperial deed, which sounds like nothing more than an excuse for a staid ensemble to cut loose and kick out the jams!
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Boston Pops Orchestra
Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra
Boston Symphony Children’s Choir
Andris Nelsons, Keith Lockhart,
Thomas Wilkins, and James Burton, conductors
Program to include
WAGNER “The Ride of the Valkyries”
from Die Walku?re
James BURTON The Lost Words, for children’s
choir and orchestra (world premiere)
TCHAIKOVSKY 1812 Overture
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2019 Tanglewood schedule
The Boston Symphony Orchestra has released the schedule for the 2019 season at Tanglewood, which will be remembered for the opening of the Tanglewood Learning Institute, the four buildings overlooking Seiji Ozawa Hall on the Leonard Bernstein camopus.
Music director Andris Nelsons will be present for the month of July, conducting 13 programs, including the world premiere of a new work by Kevin Puts, The Brightness of Light, based on letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz on July 20, and a concert performance of Wagner’s complete Die Walküre on july 27 and 28.