Tanglewood schedule week 1, July 6-12, 2012
In the winter of 1936, Mrs. Gorham Brooks and Miss Mary Aspinwall Tappan offered Tanglewood, the Tappan family estate, with its buildings and 210 acres of lawns and meadows, as a gift to Music Director Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The offer was gratefully accepted, and on August 5, 1937, what was then the Berkshire Symphonic Festival’s largest crowd assembled under a tent for the first Tanglewood concert, an all-Beethoven program including the Leonore Overture No. 3 and the Symphonies Nos. 5 and 6. To open the 75th Tanglewood season, revered conductor and Tanglewood Music Center Fellow in 1952 Christoph von Dohnányi and the BSO reprise that program on Friday, July 6.
The following night, Kansas City Symphony Music Director Michael Stern makes his BSO and Tanglewood debuts in a concert featuring popular violinist Joshua Bell, a Tanglewood guest every year since 1989, and bassist-composer Edgar Meyer, who last appeared at Tanglewood in 2000. The program will include the world premiere of Mr. Meyer’s Double Concerto for violin, double bass, and orchestra, a nod to Tanglewood’s founder and BSO Music Director 1925-1949, Serge Koussevitzky, himself a virtuoso bass player, as well as Barber’s Overture to The School for Scandal and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4, a work performed on the second-ever Tanglewood concert, August 7, 1937. On Sunday, July 8, the Boston Pops Orchestra gives its first Tanglewood 2012 performance in a concert led by conductor Keith Lockhart and featuring Broadway superstar Bernadette Peters, who has dazzled audiences with performances on stage and screen and will present selections such as Let Me Entertain You, Fever, and Some Enchanted Evening.
On Wednesday, July 11, violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and pianist-composer André Previn, whose Tanglewood history dates back to 1977, give the US premiere of Mr. Previn’s Sonata No. 2 for violin and piano, as well as perform his Tango Song, and Dance, and works by Mozart and Franck. Ozawa Hall then welcomes Sequentia, directed by Benjamin Bagby, one of the world’s most respected and innovative ensembles for medieval music, who conjure a different time on Thursday, July 12, with The Rheingold Curse: A Germanic Saga of Greed and Vengeance, which draws its inspiration from the medieval Icelandic saga, the Edda.