2013 Tanglewood reviews

Monty Alexander Trio at Tanglewood

August 25, 2004 performance; by Dave Read

Monty Alexander peered out from the Ozawa Hall stage at Tanglewood, saw the auditorium half full, and proceeded to deliver a concert of upbeat and optimistic music to an enthusiastic audience that occupied way less than half the hall. Such is the nature of the Jamaican-born pianist, whose reputation apparently carries insufficient weight in the Tanglewood market, despite a fifty year career, more than 60 albums as a leader, and performance credits with legends of jazz including Dizzy Gillespie, Frank Sinatra, Benny Golson, and Oscar Peterson.

The concert began with a piece that quoted I Got Rhythm, begun by drummer Dennis Mackrel (Obed Calvaire was listed in the program) and bassist Hassan Shakur before Alexander made his entrance. A few minutes later, his composition Look Up seemed to be running alongside the A Train, and the next tune, Just Wait, was written in response to a successful bout with cancer.

Mr. Alexander evinced an easy rapport with the audience, even if he did seem to value his early experience with Sinatra more highly than today’s jazz fan would. And he was as generous with his sidemen as any leader could be. He stood aside while Shakur took a long ambling solo that somehow encountered The Pink Panther along the way. Other familiar tunes heard tonight were Come Fly With Me, Day O, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and Sweet Georgia Brown.

The BSO was bolder than usual during the 2013 Tanglewood season with its “Popular Artist” programming. Tonight’s program had all the requisite merit on the artistic side, but as with a few earlier events, the marketing effort wasn’t up to par. That is unfortunate because, just as a full house can raise the level of excitement, a nearly empty one can be an un unhappy distraction.

Beethoven’s Ninth closes BSO’s 2013 Tanglewood season

August 25, 2013 performance; by Dave Read

There is an appealing symmetry in the scheduling of Beethoven’s Ninth at Tanglewood; it is the composition chosen 76 years ago by founding maestro Serge Koussevitsky to open the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer sojourn in the Berkshires and now it is almost always* played on the closing program. (*Former music director James Levine opened the 2006 Tanglewood season with Beethoven’s Ninth.)

For today’s concert, with BSO Conductor Emeritus Bernard Haitink leading the BSO, Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and soprano Erin Wall, mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford, tenor Joseph Kaiser, and bass-baritone John Relyea, a capacity audience filled the Koussevitsky Music Shed and seven or eight thousand more convened on the Lawn, all on a day when the weather was the sort that makes even the most sullen among us see the sunny side of things.

The performance of Maestro Haitink seemed flawless, as if he were at the pre-emeritus peak of his long career. He commanded the 200+ musicians arrayed before him with an economy of action that nonetheless elicited a banquet of beautiful music. He showed that fury can be conveyed without frenzy.

Today’s performance thwarted my most determined attempt at entering a thought-less state, so that I might simply go with what flows from the stage. The first idea that trotted along was that a setting such as this, the bucolic Berkshires on a splendid summer afternoon, must’ve been put before us so that we could access a tangible, visual analog to these sounds that are rustling our souls. And that was enough to make me quit jotting mental notes. For the balance of today’s 71 minute celebration, I was delighted merely to be marked present. The ovations that followed were joyous and prolonged and included the musicians’ foot stomping salute to Maestro Haitnik.

Yo Yo Ma’s Goat Rodeo Show at Tanglewood

August 15, 2013 performance by Dave Read

If Tanglewood were simply Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, its Tanglewood Music Center and eight or nine weeks of classical music performed by the BSO and their various guest soloists and conductors, we Berkshires locals would have plenty to be grateful for. But it is so much more, for so many reasons, not least of which is that Yo Yo Ma claims it as a sort of home for his seemingly boundless musical explorations. Incidentally, he also has an actual home in the Berkshires. (Goat Rodeo Show at Tanglewood photo: Hilary Scott).

His latest musical trip led to the Goat Rodeo Sessions, the 2011 album he recorded with bsssist Edgar Meyer, fiddler Stuart Duncan, and mandolinist Chris Thile, which won Grammys for Best Folk and Best Engineered non-classical. Both the album and tonight’s show featured singer Aoife O’Donovan, of Crooked Still and Sometymes Why. She reprised No One But You, Here and Heaven, from the album and added a stunning rendition of Bob Dylan’s Farewell, Angelina.

Everybody but Mr. Ma took turns on other instruments; Meyer played piano on Franz and the Eagle, and No One But You; Thile, whose singing blended nicely with Ms. O’Donovan’s, also played fiddle and guitar; Duncan also played banjo. Except that Ma seemed to indicate that Meyer is musical director, the impression from the audience is that these are four musicians equally expert in their own domains and equally excited to be making music with peers, just for the fun of it.

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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.

2013 Tanglewood on Parade

August, 2013 performance; by Dave Read

We arrived at Tanglewood on Parade in time for the 8pm round of brass fanfares, which preceded the gala concert in the Shed. At 2pm, brass fanfares at the Main Gate heralded the beginning of an all-day celebration featuring performances throughout the Tanglewood campus by Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center, Boston University Tanglewood Institute students, and members of the BSO.

3 orchestras and 4 conductors

The gala concert included the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Boston Pops, and Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra and four conductors. Charles Dutoit led the TMCO in Borodin’s Polovetsian Dances from Prince Igor, followed by the BSO, under the baton of Stephane Deneve, playing Gershwin’s An American in Paris. After intermission, Laureate Conductor John Williams led the Pops in his own The Cowboys Overture, then current Pops conductor Keith Lockhart led them in Bernstein’s Love Theme and Finale from On the Waterfront, and then conducted a concertino on Bond Themes with the Boston Cello Quartet.

1812 Overture w/o cannon

As always, Tanglewood on Parade was brought to a close with a fiery reading of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Missing this year, alas, were the field artillery on the lawn, which always added an extra dimension to the excitement when an earth-rattling fussilade was cued by the conductor onstage. Traditionally, Eastover Resort, whose founder was a collector of Civil War memorabilia, would loan a battery of about 8 artillery pieces to Tanglewood for the day. But after a recent change in ownership and sale of the cannon, maybe it’s time to check on the whereabouts of the Civil War cannon presented to Seiji Ozawa on the occasion of his last Tanglewood on Parade in 2001 as BSO music director?

Esperanza Spalding at Tanglewood

August 4, 2013 performance; by Dave Read

Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood was transformed Sunday evening into Ms. Esperanza Spalding‘s neighborhood; she is the phenom, who at age 4 made up her mind to have a life in music while watching Yo Yo Ma perform on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. A year later she had taught herself how to play violin; by 20, she was on the faculty of the Berklee College of Music; and in 2011 she won the Best New Artist Grammy, the first time it was awarded to a jazz musician.

Tonight, her neighborhood was the locale for a session of the Radio Music Society, comprised of a crackerjack 11-piece band, which takes its name from her 2012 double-Grammy release. The horn section was set up behind music stands covered by a giant radio facade. Ms. Spalding made her entrance a few moments after the band had begun laying down the hypnotic beat of Radio Song. A little later, she implored our indulgence while she got a few things off her mind, relating to “friends. family, loved ones…”. For most in the near-capacity audience, it was easy to assent to her wish, if not an outright privlege to attend to her artistry.

Going back and forth between upright acoustic bass and electric bass guitar, Ms. Spalding occupied a musical space that could evoke a range of progenitors from Willie Dixon, to Jack Bruce, to Ron Carter. And her singing is just as impressive and various, if not peerless. For an encore, she cut loose with some terrific scat in duet with pianist Leo Genovese, promising us that it would be an improvement over the previous night’s effort at the Newport Jazz Festival.

Over the course of nearly 2 hours, we were treated to an abundance of jazz that was so contextualized that if you zoomed in to a small fragment, it was indistinguishable from mainstream jazz, but when you relaxed and took the long view, the music was the dominant fragment of a larger work, and any number of sub-genres could be identified, from hip hop, to blues, to opera.

Yes indeed opera! A case could be made that opera is the most appropriate milieu for Esperanza Spalding. Besides her duly noted accomplishments as bassist, composer, and vocalist, she evinces a perfectly entertaining knack for story and drama – a sort of sturm und drang marked by a wink and a smile.

Radio Music Society followed Ms. Spalding’s Chamber Music Society, and after tonight’s performance, the last in the US, we’re left in eager anticipation of her next venture. Besides entertaining and delighting audiences, it’s probably a good bet also that she inspires young would-be musicians, because she exudes the same joy in performance as Yo Yo Ma does. How’s this for a coincidence? Mr. Ma was the featured soloist at this afternoon’s Boston Symphony Orchestra concert next-stage over in the Koussevitsky Music Shed!

Verdi’s Requiem at Tanglewood

July 27, 2013 performance; by Dave Read

Maestro Carlo Montanaro conducted a performance of Verdi’s Requiem at Tanglewood, leading four vocal soloists, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus in filling the Koussevitsky Music Shed and environs with sound sufficient to console, frighten, excite, and mollify. Verdi composed his “religious opera” in memory of his friend Alessandro Manzoni, using material (the Libera me) that he had originally composed for an abandoned collaborative work that was to honor Gioachino Rossini. Montanaro, substituting for the BSO’s new music director Andris Nelsons, injured when he banged his head on a door, swapped vacation plans for the seemingly immense job of leading 250 musicians in a performance of such a complex and familiar work.

It must have felt like deja vu all over again to BSO management, having finally settled on a young and fit successor to James Levine, whose BSO tenure was marred by lengthy stints on injured reserve. The Latvian Nelsons, who signed a five year contract BSO and threw the ceremonial first pitch for the Red Sox at Fenway Park the same day in June, probably doesn’t know the story of Wally Pipp, the New York Yankee first baseman who took a day off because of a headache in 1925, only to be substituted for by Lou Gehrig, who held the job every day for the next 14 years!

While he recuperated at home, Maestro Nelsons’ wife, soprano Kristine Opolais was on stage, along with mezzo soprano Lioba Braun, tenor Dmytro Popov, and bass-baritone Eric Owens, all of whom gave bravura performances. Here is how she described the accident to the Boston Globe “It was dark, and the door was closed, and he didn’t see it. He’s big, and he’s like a big child. It is comic.”

Attending such a performance at Tanglewood on a pleasant summer evening in the Berkshires, with a pretty full house and a very full stage holding some 200 musicians and singers, is a stimulating experience. Verdi’s Requiem opens in whispers and draws to a close in the quiet. That seems a particularly good musical idea, without a readily apparent real world analogue. Unless you view a life as an event that occurs between rests? At any rate, so one is led gently into and finally eased out of the terrific Sturm und Drang that comprises the lively 80+ minutes within. But music’s job on the mind ought not overwhelm its work on the body, so it is good to will the mind quiet during a concert. Not easy, but good.

Judging from the audience’s response, Montanaro hit it out of the park; the ovation was loud and sustained for ten minutes or so. And he enjoyed it too, sharing his response on Twitter:

Beautiful Verdi Requiem!!… Deep emotions and great music!.. Thanks to everybody for this touching performance!!..hope to see you soon..

— Carlo Montanaro (@carlomontanaro) July 28, 2013

West Side Story at Tanglewood

July 13, 2013 performance; by Dave Read

Two nights after a merely modest audience was attracted to Tanglewood for the concert performance in Ozawa Hall of John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby, an ungainly horde assembled at the Koussevitsky Music Shed for a screening of West Side Story with the Boston Symphony Orchestra playing the score. While some of that can be attributed to Thursday vs. Saturday scheduling, an audience disparity in the neighborhood of 8 – 1 cannot be overlooked. (See our review of John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby)

Both programs featured genre-swapping hybrids with significant Tanglewood roots. The Great Gatsby was born a Book, became a Hollywood movie four times (plus TV movie and series), and an opera, when the Met commissioned it from Tanglewood Fellow, instructor, and administrator John Harbison in honor of former BSO Music Director James Levine.

West Side Story was an idea of choreographer Jerome Robbins who brought it to Leonard Bernstein, a member of the first class in 1940 of the Tanglewood Music Center. It opened on Broadway in 1957, with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by Arthur Laurents. It won 2 Tonys out of 6 nominations; the 1961 movie won 10 of 11 Oscars. That doesn’t mean that the movie adaptation was that much better, but it sure was an overwhelming success.

Tonight’s presentation may be deserving of awards for the myriad technical work that it represents, deleting the orchestral score while maintaining the dialogue and lyrics, for example, but we found it somehow lacking. Rather than cohere into a unified artistic expression – a sensory experience of some measure, it remained in parts: 1. Leonard Bernstein’s score, 2. the heavily re-worked movie. (Besides, the Shed plus 15k patrons make for an infelicitous film venue.)

While these concerns colored the overall experience, they didn’t lessen the excitement of so many passages, particularly the brilliantly operatic songs America, Cool, which seemed to get an additional buoyancy from the orchestra’s masterful playing. The BSO, under David Newman’s muscular direction, delivered the tour de force performance required by so-varied a score. The orchestra was augmented tonight by mandolin, electric guitar, drum kit, and several additional brass players.

But, what’s the point of monkeying around with something that worked so well the first time around? Why not work up an Opera version, instead, which is the genre Bernstein originally proposed when Robbins told him he wanted to make a modern day version of Romeo and Juliet? And then schedule it for a Saturday night!

The usual Film night at Tanglewood, featuring a performance by the Boston Pops of music composed by John Williams for movies often directed by Steven Speilburg, is scheduled for Aug. 24; tonight’s conductor David Newman will return to the podium for that program.

The Great Gatsby John Harbison’s Opera performed at Tanglewood

July 11, 2013 performance; by Dave Read

The concert performance in Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood of The Great Gatsby, by the orchestra and chorus of Emmanuel Music, was so enjoyable that we’re tempted to propose a corollary to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s adage, There are no second acts in American lives, to wit, American novels can get third lives.

None of the movie versions of The Great Gatsby has achieved anything near the stature of the novel, but we think the opera has legs and can give the book a run for its money. Whereas Fitzgerald’s standing as a prose stylist cannot be ignored, his choices relating to plots and characters can make it easy to overlook his books. But it is precisely the contrivedly tragic plot and one-dimensional characters that make Gatsby such a good fit for Opera.

We particularly enjoyed the performance of baritone David Kravitz as Nick Carraway, the steady narrator, and we came to prize soprano Devon Guthrie, who got Daisy Buchanan off to a slow start, only to hit her stride and then practically blow the roof off the joint in the middle of Act ll.

Composer John Harbison, recipient this month of the BSO’s Horblit Award and present tonight, was commissioned in 1998 by the Metropolitan Opera to compose the opera in honor of James Levine’s 25th anniversary there. Since then, there have been several related projects including the compilation of a Gatsby Suite. In the program notes, Mr. Harbison, whose Tanglewood relationship includes stints as a TMC Conducting Fellow, faculty member and coordinator of the composition program, calls tonight’s performance a revival.

Ozawa Hall was a lovely accompanist for the performance on a rare comfortable July evening, with a near-capacity audience indoors and a good compliment of West Eggers peering on from the lawn.

Vince Gill with Boston Pops after Tanglewood thunderstorms

July 7, 2013 performance; by Dave Read

Vince Gill performs at Tanglewood with the Boston Pops and conductor Keith Lockhart. — Vince Gill performs at Tanglewood with the Boston Pops and conductor Keith Lockhart; Hilary Scott photo.

Opening weekend of the BSO’s 2013 Tanglewood schedule called for a performance by the Boston Pops with special guest Vince Gill; an ill-timed thunderstorm blew the planned program out the window. Instead of a 2:30 start for the Pops’ set of seven selections and a second set with Gill and his band after a 25 minute intermission, what transpired was a single 85 minute concert.

Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockart led the Pops through a truncated set designed to celebrate the American West. Besides two selections from Rodeo, by the familiar and decidedly unWestern Aaron Copland, the highlight of the set was Carmen Goes Country, a recent gift to the Boston Pops from its former principal arranger and Harmonica Rascal Richard Hayman.

Vince Gill mines the jazz vein

Vince Gill at Tanglewood with the Boston Pops and conductor Keith Lockhart. — Vince Gill at Tanglewood with the Boston Pops and conductor Keith Lockhart; Hilary Scott photo.

Vince Gill’s setlist included Whenever You Come Around, his paean to wife Amy Grant, and concluded with his lament for his brother, Go Rest High on That Mountain. His compositions were well adapted to the Pops’ accompaniment; often the result was a rich burnishing. The one exception was his new “legitimate jazz song” Faint of Heart, which got the endorsement of jazz diva Diana Krall, who sings it with him on his new album The Time Jumpers.

Placing a song from any musical genre within a symphonic setting is a risk almost always worth taking, at least for the sake of artistic curiosity. But when an artist is already stepping out from the comfort of his genre to experiment in another, taking the further step of giving it a symphonic wrap dulls the point of writing a jazz song in the first place. We look forward to hearing it late some night in a dingy roadhouse joint, which is the milieu it seemed to suggest, beneath the too-lush embellishment of the orchestra.

Gill is a friendly and funny guy who recalled his previous Tanglewood performance along with Amy Grant, when they were guests on a James Taylor program. Mentioning Taylor’s presence for this concert, he said that singing Sweet Baby James with him was a dream come true.

Tanglewood opening night 2013 with Joshua Bell

Article by Dave Read
The all-Tchaikovsky Opening Night of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2013 season at Tanglewood featured guest artist Joshua Bell in the Violin Concerto and guest conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos on a program that included Symphony No. 5. The July 5, 2013 concert marks the 25th consecutive year Mr. Bell has performed at Tanglewood. Also a long-time regular guest at Tanglewood, Maestro de Burgos leads four programs on the 2013 schedule.

Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos leads Joshua Bell and BSO in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto

Photos and video from Tanglewood opening night 2013 with violinist Joshua Bell soloing and Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. (Hilary Scott photos and BSO video).