Berkshire Links

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 25, 2024 performance – Another Tanglewood season has passed, with all its redemptive power, all its contemplative force. The Boston Symphony Orchestra almost always concludes its Berkshires sojourn with a performance of Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Opus 125, by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), which was first performed 200 years ago.

The great cellist and world citizen, Mstislav Rostropovich, conducted the first performance I attended, here in the Koussevitsky Music Shed, in 1999. Today, last minute replacement conductor Ludovic Morlot elicited a nonpareil performance from the orchestra, whose multitude of sound melded seamlessly with the poetry of Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy to send the audience, now practically levitated from their seats, into the after-Tanglewood chapter of their year.

The Tanglewood Festival Chorus, whose first performance in 1970 was Beethoven’s Ninth, has settled snugly into the second half of its first century, now under the direction of James Burton, who succeeded founder John Oliver in 2017.

Organizations such as the BSO (nee 1881) don’t reach the august stage of the ancients without due reverence for anniversaries. Celebrations also lessen the load on box office workers, because who would dare to miss a bicentennial performance of Beethoven’s Ninth in the Koussevitsky Music Shed in the 150th anniversary year of Koussevitsky’s birth, especially since the Ninth was the first piece he scheduled for performance at Tanglewood?

Way out here in the hinterlands, how drab would August be without Koussevitsky’s legacy, without the summertime tenancy of musicians from around the world, which affords us such refuge from the world of woe our people’s republic has become. I beg your leave to address what I perceive to be an error in the notes in today’s program book, where it says “…the words come from Beethoven, not Schiller.”

The sentiment may be Beethoven’s, but the words were chosen and arranged by Schiller. Beethoven could have asked a painter to produce a visual image of his symphony – and there’s no shortage of painters who have attempted to portray heavenly human harmony, but that wouldn’t make the painting his, any more than Schiller’s work is.

Metaphor is the writer’s piano, by which we speak the language of music, painting, architecture, sculpture, and dance with one tongue. Without the addition of Schiller’s poetry, audiences are left alone to find the right words – to find sensible expression for what Beethoven’s music amounts to in the soul.

Nor should we overlook the genius it took for Beethoven to paint outside the lines, to think outside the box, and marry the choral with the orchestral, which produced the singular work of art that is Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor. And we’re glad for the waves of reflected glory that comfort Schiller in otherwise chilly posterity.

As a prelude, Tanglewood Festival Chorus director James Burton led the chorus in Bruckner’s Ecce sacerdos magnus, for chorus, three trombones, and organ. The vocal soloists, who added unnameable shades and tones to Schiller’s Ode were Ambur Braid, soprano, Jess Dandy, contralto Elgan Llyr Thomas, tenor, and Davóne Tines, bass.

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 23, 2024 performance – The final Friday concert of the 2024 Tanglewood season of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summertime sojourn in the Berkshires consisted of Frederick Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Opus 11, featuring pianist Bruce Liu, followed by Edward Elgar’s Variations on an Original Theme, Opus 36, Enigma, with Ryan Bancroft conducting.

Chopin (1810-1849), a prodigy who made his debut as a pianist at age 7, was so crazy for the piano that he composed no music that wasn’t piano-centric. Besides all the brilliant music he created for us, Chopin also was a pithy wit, as this great line proves: “I’ve never heard anything so great; in it Beethoven snaps his fingers at the whole world.” (Chopin was referring to the Archduke Trio)

Who knows whether tonight’s piano soloist, Bruce Liu, ever snaps his fingers at anyone? He certainly makes an audience snap to attention when his fingers dance along the keyboard. At the conclusion of the concerto, the audience called for an encore, and I was surprised to hear another note from the piano, so exhausted I imagined it to be.

Edward Elgar, pretty much an autodidact, had the great good luck to marry the woman who would be the catalyst of his best work. As we learn in the program notes, during their thirty years of marriage, Elgar became the first English composer of widespread acclaim in two centuries; sadly, however, he completed no large works during his fourteen years as a widower.

In his own program notes on Enigma, Elgar wrote, “through and over the whole set another larger theme ‘goes,’ but is not played.” We note that his countryman, Churchill, never found the key to Russia, which he famously called a riddle, wrapped in mystery, inside an enigma. Elgar gave us the key to his: each variation represents how he imagined someone important to him would have played the original theme, beginning with his wife!

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, August 18, 2024 performance – The penultimate Sunday matinee of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2024 season at Tanglewood featured celebrated Berkshires homeboy Yo-Yo Ma taking his annual star turn on the Koussevitsky Music Shed stage, as soloist for a performance of Robert Schumann’s Cello concerto in A minor, Opus 129.

It made for a particularly touching moment, when departing BSO assistant conductor Earl Lee told the audience the role Mr. Ma played in his early musical development. As a boy in southern South Korea, after telling his parents he would like to play cello, he was given a laser disc titled Yo-Yo Ma at Tanglewood!

That is the sort of remark welcome from the stage at the start of a concert. It demonstrates the essential continuity of the arts, of culture. The musicians of tomorrow will have been trained and inspired by the musicians of today. When kept brief and to the point as today, there is no chance for the audience to be diverted from their purpose in attending a concert of music.

Artists of the order of Yo-Yo Ma, and earlier soloists this season, are born with such gifts that even if music weren’t available, they’d find an avenue of expression elsewhere. Having attended the master class he gave in Ozawa Hall a few years ago, we know how wonderful a teacher he is; when he performs, he is so eloquent in gesture that the lost art of pantomime also is within his ken.

Maestro Lee, music director of the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra, elicited a rousing performance of Beethoven’s seventh symphony to conclude the concert, and release us back to fraught reality, at least until we’re re-launched, one more time next week, by Beethoven’s Ninth!