2015 Tanglewood reviews

August 12, 2015 Tanglewood concert review by Dave Read

The culmination of the Tanglewood Music Center’s 75th anniversary celebration was the Aug. 8, 2015 performance of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, the Symphony of a Thousand, with BSO music director Andris Nelsons conducting 363 musicians, including the TMC Fellows, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, eight leading vocal soloists, the Boston University Tanglewood Institute Chorus, the American Boychoir, and members of the BSO. Not only was this concert an impressive spectacle, but it was as thrilling a musical experience as one could imagine.

Latin hymn combined with Goethe’s Faust

For a brief video of this performance, visit streambso.org, where you’ll see that Mahler’s 8th opens loud and bright, organ and choir invoking a church-like setting. But however universal every doctrine claims its scope, this performance of Mahler’s 8th would bear no doctrinal delimitation; this celebration was no church-going event! Mahler’s treatment of Goethe’s text is practically a sampler of musical styles and ideas, leading to the final chorus. The journey is spellbinding, building naturally to a close, nothing forced, no straining, the accumulation of one beautiful sound after another until your senses – and your soul, have been thouroughly engaged and satisfied.

About Tanglewood: box office, tickets, getting there, nearby hotels

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Getting around the Tanglewood campus

The Tanglewood campus, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Tanglewood Music Center comprises several hundred acres in the towns of Lenox and Stockbridge. It is the location of the Koussevitsky Music Shed and Ozawa Hall, where hundreds of thousands attend concerts and a variety of events, including picnics. We always advise new visitors to arrive early and take their daily walking exercise wandering the beautiful Tanglewood grounds.

Here is a dynamic map of the Tanglewood grounds, with photos and information for such points of interest as Aaron Copland Library, Highwood Manor House, The Glass House, and The Lion’s Gate.

August 7, 2015 Article by Dave Read

This year’s Tanglewood on Parade Gala Concert, the Tanglewood Music Center’s main fundraising event, was an especially satisfying evening of music, even if a little sad because John Williams’ health prevented his participation. With the Boston Pops conductor laureate absent, tonight’s audience was made to settle for three conductors, instead of the usual four, but got to witness the Pops debut of Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Andris Nelsons.

The program got underway with Nelsons leading the BSO in selections from Berlioz, Ravel, and Shostokovich. Maestro Nelsons didn’t address the audience tonight, but he certainly was communicative, displaying an uncanny vocabulary of conducting gestures. So fluid and captivating as he cajoles and exhorts the orchestra, this successor to Koussevitsky makes you think he may, as well, be a disciple of Balanchine.

In the next segment, popular guest conductor Stephane Deneve led the Fellows of the TMC in three John Williams compositions. Deneve was both funny and eloquent as he talked about his own affection for Williams and in introducing the compositions, including Just down West Street … on the left, Williams’ gift in honor of the TMC’s 75th anniversary. The Violin Concerto, a tribute to his first wife whao had just died, featured longtime Pops concertmaster Tamara Smirnova taking a rare turn as soloist.

Boston Pops pay tribute to Frank Sinatra
The festivities resumed after intermission with Keith Lockhart conducting the Boston Pops in Kabalevsky’s Overture to Colas Breugnon, followed by A Tribute to Frnk Sinatra: “Ole Blue Eyes at 100.” Not only were the Pops’ great jazz chops again in evidence, but so was the clarity of their enunciation, as you could practically hear the lyrics in their renditions of Chicago and New York, New York.

Star Wars and the Cold War

Pops conductor Lockhart then introduced the Pops debut of Maestro Nelsons for the performance of another John Williams selection, Throne Room & finale from Star Wars. During the Reagan Administration, “Star Wars” became the nickname for the Strategic Defense Initiative, one of the closing initiatives of the Cold War, which is notable because Reagan’s Secretary of State, George P. Shultz, a frequent Tanglewood patron, was in the audience tonight.

Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture

No matter how exciting the program and how brilliant the performances, everything else is merely prelude to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, which always concludes the gala concert, itself the finale to the annual day-long celebration of music at Tanglewood. We heard an unusual rendition of it here last month, performed by the Boston Pops Brass & Percussion section and two world-champion drum and bugle corps, the Blue Devils of California and the Boston Crusaders. While that was great fun, tonight’s rendition, under Nelson’s impassioned direction, was truly breathtaking.

July 18, 2015 Article by Dave Read

Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra gave a concert in Ozawa Hall yesterday that could serve as the template for all concerts: two sets artfully arranged to engage, sustain, and satisfy an auditor’s attention, with just the right measure of exposition from the stage to establish a conversation, contextualize the selections, and identify the musicians. Marsalis was an amiable host from his 3rd row seat in the trumpet section of the band, which he led through an overview of early 20th century jazz in the first set, followed by a set made up of compositions and arrangements by musicians in the band.

Tonight’s concert got underway with fairly quiet and subtle playing on compositions from the 1930s by Benny Carter, Symphony in Riffs and Duke Ellington, Mood Indigo. By the time the 3rd piece was over, George Gershwin’s Fascinating Rhythm, we knew we were in for quite a treat, as we’d already heard lovely solos by Marsalis on trumpet, Victor Goines on clarinet, and all three trombone players. The set ended with Things to Come by Dizzy Gillespie, which afforded everybody ample space to play, especially the exquisite rhythm section, emerging in the wake of a long trumpet run.

After intermission, the concert continued with a piece called 2/3 Adventure, by bassist Carlos Henriquez, then one rooted in spirituals by trombonist Chris Crenshaw. Next in the spotlight was pianist Dan Nimmer with a selection from a suite he composed from important political speeches. That was followed by sax player Sherman Irby’s arrangement of a composition by Wayne Shorter, who played with the orchestra recently.

The concert closed with Marsalis’s own Back to Basics from his Oratorio, Blood on the Fields, the first jazz composition to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Music (1997). Everyone in the band got another chance to solo, with Marsalis himself bringing it all to a humorous, muttering conclusion, waving the plunger mute over the bell of his trumpet.

Marsalis dedicates concert to the late Gunther Schuller

Marsalis dedicated the concert to the late Gunther Schuller, telling the audience that his stint at the Berkshire Music Center, which Schuller ran from 1970 until 1984, “changed my life.” At 17, he was the youngest musician ever admitted; two years later, he joined the Jazz Messengers lead by legendary drummer and bandleader Art Blakey.

• Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra Wynton Marsalis, Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood
• Tanglewood tickets:
• Box Office: 617-266-1200; 888-266-1200
• Website: tanglewood.org

July 8, 2015 Article by Dave Read

The Tanglewood Brass Spectacular featured performances by the Boston Pops Brass & Percussion section, the Boston Crusaders, the third-oldest drum corps in America, celebrating their 75th anniversary; and the sixteen-time Drum Corps International World Champion Blue Devils from Concord, California. The program was suggested by BSO trumpeter and drum corps alumnus Michael Martin, whose father Freddy Martin, one of the genre’s most esteemed figures, was a conductor and composer on tonight’s program.

First, the host ensemble performed a variety of pieces, including two by Boston Pops laureate conductor John Williams. They demonstrated why the Pops and the BSO always sound so good when they veer into the jazz and pop realms, because these players sure can swing! Then the Blue Devils and Boston Crusaders took turns, each filling the Koussevitsky Music Shed stage with an assortment of musical instruments never seen there before. Besides all the horns and drums, there was an array of vibrophones from wing to wing.

Massed bands perform Tcahikovsky’s 1812 Overture

The 2+ hour concert closed with an unprecented performance by all three ensembles of Tcahikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Tanglewood patrons are used to exciting performances of that chestnut as the finale to the annual Tanglewood on Parade, but tonight’s rendition was truly breathtaking.

July 6, 2015 Article by Dave Read

The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2015 Tanglewood season got underway with an all-American program of works by John Harbison, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and Duke Ellington. While BSO music director Andris Nelsons was conducting in Germany, the orchestra was led tonight by French conductor Jacques Lacombe, who made his Tanglewood debut last year.

Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F, with Kirill Gerstein

Gerstein, who has played twice before at Tanglewood, has quite a varied and impressive resume. While a youngster receiving classical training, he taught himself jazz and after coming to the attention of vibraphonist, composer, and jazz educator Gary Burton during a trip to the Soviet Union, he moved to Boston to study jazz piano, becoming at 14, the youngest student ever at Berklee College of Music, and spent two summers at the BU Tanglewood Institute. Today he is artist-in-residence at Berklee and member of the piano and chamber music faculty at the Boston Conservatory.

Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, Ellington’s Harlem

Sad to say, but the exuberance elicited by the first portion of tonight’s program made it difficult to attend with an appropriate seriousness to Aaron Copland‘s elegaic Licnoln Portrait, in the second – especially given the recent murders in Charlestown, SC, which deepened the sadness of how we have failed to attain the quality of nationhood envisioned by Lincoln. John Douglas Thompson, the actor who has performed frequently with Shakespeare & Co., was eloquent and powerful in the spoken part.