By Dave Read, July 13, 2025 performance – The Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted today by Thomas Ades, substituting for Esa Pekka-Salonen, performed a program highlighted by the Sibelius Violin concerto in D minor, Opus 47, with soloist Pekka Kuusisto. Tumblebird Contrails composed by Gabriella Smith opened the program, which concluded with the Sibelius Symphony no. 5 in E-flat cl;osed it.
The concert hall, during a performance by a symphony orchestra, becomes a place where the dividing distinctions of verbal language will vaporize and disappear, if we are able to stem the flow of words between our ears. Then, the universal language of music can flood in, and have its way with us.
Despite many such visits to concert halls, the composer’s art baffles me – I’m as mystified by the vocabulary, grammar, and diction of musical composition as I am by telekinesis. But I know what I like, and there’s not much, in musical or verbal language, that I like more than the Sibelius Violin concerto in D minor, Opus 47.
There’s an equality in excellence, or, at least a disinclination to impose a dividing hierarchy on favorite compositions. But what’s the harm in speculation? If told my ears would fall off in twenty minutes, I’d cue up the final movement of this piece. There’s something brutally honest about it; it’s music at its most basic, melody imposed on rhythm – and though it holds together as a bar of bullion does, every second brings more new sounds.
So passes another summer Sunday at Tanglewood, the magical place named by one of America’s first verbal artists, Nathaniel Hawthorne. What was an unhappy term of exile for him has grown into the veritable haven of harmony for multitudes seeking temporary refuge from the cacophony of our upheaved political reality.