Tanglewood — 2018/08/24-26

This weekend is the final one of the BSO's 2018 Tanglewood Season. Listen in on WCRB at 8:00 p.m EDST on Friday and Saturday and 7:00 p.m. on Sunday.


Friday, August 24, 2018.  We get to hear the BSO et al. perform what they call "the longest symphony in the standard repertoire." The performance detail page, with its usual links to performer bios and background material, describes the concert thus:

Andris Nelsons conducts Mahler Symphony No. 3 featuring Susan Graham and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus

Tanglewood 

Koussevitzky Music Shed - Lenox, MA - View Map

Andris Nelsons leads the BSO, Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and Boston Symphony Children's Choir in a performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 3, another work central to Bernstein's repertoire, with Susan Graham as mezzo-soprano soloist. A multi-faceted and emotionally wide-ranging work, the Third Symphony is notable for its length (the longest symphony in the standard repertoire), difficulty, and overwhelming cumulative impact. Across its nearly 100-minute duration, the broad musical canvas incorporates a full range of musical and emotional expression, moving through rousing fanfares, tender lyricism, and melancholy to the height of exaltation.

(Some emphasis added.)

Need I say more? Well, it's a lot of music, but — while I don't recall specifics of this symphony — Mahler's style of music at this time in his career generally isn't difficult to listen to, and my more general memory of it is that it is quite engaging. So it should be pretty good.


Saturday, August 25, 2018.  On Saturday, the summer of Bernstein reaches its grand finale. The performance detail page doesn't give a listing of every piece to be played, but from what we are told, including the long list of performers, we get a feel for what it will be.

The Bernstein Centennial Celebration at Tanglewood

Tanglewood 

Koussevitzky Music Shed - Lenox, MA - View Map

Reflecting the season-long theme, The Bernstein Centennial Celebration at Tanglewood will spotlight Bernstein's wide-ranging talents as a composer, his many gifts as a great interpreter and champion of other composers, and his role as an inspirer of a new generation of musicians and music lovers across the country and around the globe. The gala concert will feature a kaleidoscopic array of artists and ensembles from the worlds of classical music, film, and Broadway. The entire first half of the program is dedicated to selections from such brilliant Bernstein works as Candide, West Side Story, Mass, and Serenade. Music from the classical canon very dear to Bernstein's heart-selections from Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn and music by Copland-plus a new work by John Williams, makes up a good portion of the program's second half; the finale of Mahler's ResurrectionSymphony brings the program to a dramatic close.

(Some emphasis added.)


Sunday, August 25, 2018.  The season ends with the traditional Beethoven 9th Symphony, preceded by two brief pieces by Bernstein. The performance detail page has its usual links and gives this synopsis.

Christoph Eschenbach conducts Beethoven

Tanglewood 

Koussevitzky Music Shed - Lenox, MA - View Map

Christoph Eschenbach leads the Boston Symphony Orchestra in its traditional season-ending performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, with soprano Hanna-Elisabeth Müller, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, tenor Joseph Kaiser, baritone Thomas Hampson, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus.

(Some emphasis added.)

And so we bid farewell to another summer of concerts from Tanglewood, with another massive work, one which is very well known. Although it's not my favorite Beethoven symphony, it's certainly beautiful at times and exciting at times, and it's certainly fitting for the occasion. Enjoy.

The Boston Symphony returns to Symphony Hall to open the season there on October 11, with the first Saturday concert on the 13th. Meanwhile WCRB will fill the six intervening Saturday evenings with concerts previously recorded. I don't see a listng for September 1, but the rest can be found here. As usual, I plan to post about each as it approaches.

Tanglewood — 2016/08/17-19

This weekend the season at Tanglewood continues, with all three of the major concerts available over WCRB. (See also the additional programming information on their website.)


Friday, August 17, 2018.  Here's the description from the BSO program detail page:

Andris Nelsons conducts Beethoven and Shostakovich
UnderScore Friday Concert

Tanglewood 

Koussevitzky Music Shed - Lenox, MA - View Map

Patrons will hear comments about the program directly from onstage BSO musician J. William Hudgins (percussion).

Andris Nelsons leads the BSO in Shostakovich's Symphony No. 4-part of Maestro Nelsons' and the orchestra's ongoing project of performing and recording the composer's complete symphonies-a fine, substantial work that had to wait 25 years for its premiere due to censorship by the Soviet regime. One the first half of the program, frequent BSO guest pianist Yefim Bronfman joins Maestro Nelsons and the orchestra for Beethoven's expansive and lyrical Piano Concerto No. 4, which contains moments of grandeur and pomp as well as passages of glorious weightlessness and ephemeral brushes of color.

(Some emphasis added.)

There are also the usual links to program notes, audio previews, and performer bios.

Of course, you can't go wrong with Beethoven. As for the Shostakovich, here's what I wrote after hearing it in Symphony Hall last March:

I wasn't really expecting to like the Shostakovich, but it turned out to be pretty good. Despite its length, I never felt that it was getting to be too much. There is enough variety, especially going from full orchestra to featuring solo instruments, and plentiful musical ideas, to keep it from getting dull. I had never heard either piece [this one or the Bernstein Second Symphony which preceded it on that program], and now I wouldn't mind seeing either on another program.

So it should be an evening of good listening.


Saturday, August 18, 2018.  It's an all Bernstein program. As always, we turn to the BSO program detail page for links and this description:

Andris Nelsons conducts an All-Bernstein Program with the Boston Ballet and featuring violinist Baiba Skride

Tanglewood 

Koussevitzky Music Shed - Lenox, MA - View Map

Andris Nelsons and the BSO present an all-Bernstein program, which begins with a fully-staged performance of the composer's ballet Fancy Free in a first-ever collaboration with the Boston Ballet. Bernstein's first ballet score and Robbins' first full-scale choreographic effort, Fancy Free catapulted both artists (who were both just 25) to stardom. In what would become his signature style, Robbins combined classical choreography with jazz and popular dance moves. Just months after Fancy Free was premiered at the old Metropolitan Opera House, its scenario had become the basis for Bernstein and Robbins' hit Broadway musical On the Town (performed July 7). Fancy Free is being presented here using Robbins' original choreography. The program continues with the Divertimento for Orchestra, composed for the BSO's centenary celebration in 1980, and concludes with the Serenade (after Plato's "Symposium"), for violin and orchestra, featuring soloist Baiba Skride.

(Some emphasis added.)

My brother's call from Japan will take me away from the Serenade and maybe the end of the Divertimento. I'd rather miss "Fancy Free" — although if we could see the dancing, I'd be more interested in the ballet — but there you have it.


Sunday, August 19, 2018.  This concert brings us four works, including a Tanglewood-related world premiere, more by Bernstein, and the BSO's "own" piece by Bartók. Herewith, the performance detail page's synopsis:

Yo-Yo Ma joins Andris Nelsons for Copland, Bernstein, Williams and Bartók
The Leonard Bernstein Memorial Concert
Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra

Tanglewood 

Koussevitzky Music Shed - Lenox, MA - View Map

World-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma returns to Tanglewood alongside Maestro Nelsons and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra for the annual Leonard Bernstein Memorial Concert. The program celebrates the completion of sculptures that John Williams commissioned for the Tanglewood grounds of three of the Festival's seminal figures, who are also personal heroes of the composer: Aaron Copland, Serge Koussevitzky, and Leonard Bernstein. The program features Yo-Yo Ma, Andris Nelsons, and the BSO in the world premiere of a new John Williams work for cello and orchestra, specially written for this occasion. Mr. Ma is also featured in Bernstein's Three Meditations from Mass, for cello and orchestra, the composer's reworking of selections from ambitious staged pageant/oratorio composed for the 1971 inauguration of Washington's Kennedy Center. Aptly opening the concert is Copland's An Outdoor Overture, a 1938 work from the beginning of the composer's American populist period and the first work by Copland that Bernstein conducted at Tanglewood. Concluding the program is perhaps Koussevitzky's most famous commission, Bartók's incandescent Concerto for Orchestra, which the BSO premiered in 1944.

(Some emphasis added.)

The new work by Williams is titled "Highwood's Ghost, An Encounter for Harp, Cello, and Orchestra." I always like to hear world premieres, so I'm looking forward to it, and Copland can be very enjoyable. Bernstein should be okay, and I've heard the Bartók so often that it's lost its shock value, and I can sort of enjoy it.

Don't forget: the Sunday concert is heard by "tape" delay at 7:00 p.m. — the Friday and Saturday are presented live at 8:00, EDT.

It should be a pretty good series of concerts. Enjoy.

Tanglewood — 2016/08/10-12

This weekend the BSO is deviating from their usual format. Instead of the usual 8:00 p.m. concert on Friday, they are giving a one-hour Young People's concert at 7:00 p.m., in homage to Bernstein's Young People's Concerts when he was Music Director of the New York Philharmonic. WCRB will not be broadcasting it, but I thought you might like to see the description from the BSO's program description page.

Young People's Concert

Tanglewood 

Koussevitzky Music Shed - Lenox, MA - View Map

Building on a tradition of educational concerts for young listeners that dated back decades, in 1958 Leonard Bernstein, who had just begun his tenure as conductor of the New York Philharmonic, initiated his own series of "Young People's Concerts" to be broadcast on CBS television. The fourteen-season series-totaling fifty-three episodes in all-became a model for educational programming, making a point of avoiding condescension and pedantry, not shying away from the unfamiliar, and allowing Bernstein's boundless enthusiasm and charisma to carry the day. It was lightning in a bottle-only rarely have similar programs approached the show's popularity since it went off the air in 1972. Bernstein's guests included Aaron Copland, the then-fifteen-year-old Israeli composer Shulamit Ran, singers Marni Nixon and Walter Berry, conductors Seiji Ozawa and James DePreist, and the "New York Rock and Roll Ensemble," among many others. Between 2004 and 2013, these programs were released on DVD.

The first few programs, beginning with the introductory "What Is Music?" telecast in January 1958, had a broad focus-American music, orchestration, the nature of classical music, and the like. As the series progressed, there were segments on more specific subjects-the music of Mahler, Sibelius, Hindemith, and Charles Ives, birthday celebrations of Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, and Dmitri Shostakovich, the acoustics of concert halls, and an entire show on Beethoven's opera Fidelio-subject matter that few elementary educational curricula would dare broach today. But perhaps Bernstein was onto something there: by trusting and challenging his countless young listeners to go beyond their own expectations of themselves, he planted seeds of curiosity that long continued to bear fruit.

WCRB will give us a rebroadcast from a couple of years ago at the usual time.


Friday, August 10, 2018.  WCRB rebroadcasts and streams the Tanglewood concert of August 27, 2016. The program detail page is no longer available on the BSO website, but here's the synopsis I copied at the time.

Tanglewood favorite Yo-Yo Ma joins the Boston Symphony Orchestra and conductor Michael Stern on Saturday, August 27, to open the final weekend of the BSO's 2016 Tanglewood season, performing Haydn's Cello Concerto in C and John Williams's Heartwood,for cello and orchestra, and Rosewood and Pickin', for solo cello, on a program that also includes Bernstein's Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront and Respighi's Pines of Rome.

(Some emphasis added.)

The order of performance is Bernstein, Haydn, Williams, and Respighi. I suppose the intermission is after the Haydn. It should be worth listening to.


Saturday, August 11, 2018.  It's Boston Pops this evening, playing film music, as described, with extreme brevity on the program detail page:

John Williams' Film Night

Tanglewood 

Koussevitzky Music Shed - Lenox, MA - View Map

John Williams' Film Night has long been established as one of the Tanglewood calendar's most consistently captivating evenings. Join Mr. Williams as he presents this year's celebration of the music of Hollywood and beyond, featuring the Boston Pops and BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons.

(Some emphasis added.)
My father used to use the line about concerts at the bandstand in the park: "You can't tell from where you're sitting what the band is going to play." Just listen and enjoy.


Sunday, August 12, 2018.  At 7:00 p.m., we get to hear the afternoon concert. As a curtain raiser, Michael Tilson Thomas conducts a piece he composed, Then we hear Rachmaninoff and Mahler. More detail comes from the BSO's page:

Michael Tilson Thomas conducts Tilson Thomas, Rachmaninoff and Mahler

Tanglewood 

Koussevitzky Music Shed - Lenox, MA - View Map

San Francisco Symphony Music Director and former BSO Assistant Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas returns to Tanglewood, where he won the Koussevitzky Music Prize as a student of Bernstein's in 1969. To open the program, he leads the BSO in his own Agnegram, a 1998 work that is alternately jazzy, elegant, humorous, and direct. Brilliant young Russian pianist Igor Levit then takes center stage for Rachmaninoff's virtuosic and glittering Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Closing the concert is Mahler's at times brooding, at times vigorously energetic Symphony No. 1. Bernstein's championing of Mahler's symphonies was a big factor in making his music a staple of the orchestral repertoire.

(Some emphasis added.)


So there you have it — three concerts for your enjoyment on air and on line over WCRB.

Tanglewood — 2016/08/03-05

The BSO is giving us one piece by Bernstein and a whole slew of music by composers from Eastern Europe this weekend. I'm looking forward to some of it.


Friday, August 3, 2018.  We begin with approximately five minutes of sheer delight: the Overture to "Ruslan and Ludmila" by Glinka. Then there's a piano concerto by Rachmaninoff. After intermission comes the complete score to Firebird by Stravinsky, which is not as jarring as "The Rite of Spring." The official explanation, along with links to further information, can be found on the performance detail page:

Glinka, Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky with Kirill Gerstein
UndersScore Friday Concert

Tanglewood 

Koussevitzky Music Shed - Lenox, MA - View Map

Patrons will hear comments about the program directly from onstage BSO musician Robert Sheena (English horn).

Koussevitzky Artist Kirill Gerstein joins BSO Associate Conductor Ken-David Masur and the BSO for Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2, a prime example of the composer's Russian-tinged Romanticism. The program begins with Glinka's infectiously energetic Overture to Ruslan and Ludmila, the second of his two operas. After intermission, Mr. Masur leads the orchestra in a performance of the complete music from Stravinsky's ballet The Firebird, a scintillating score that proved to be the composer's breakout success when the ballet opened in Paris in 1910.

(Some emphasis added.)

It will be interesting to hear how Robert Sheena handles the introducer's duties at the beginning. At any rate, for me the best part of the concert comes at the beginning. I'll listen to the rest while watching the Red Sox.


Saturday, August 4, 2018.  Check out the performance detail page for links to further resources (including performer bios when you click the thumbnail pics). It gives the folloeing synopsis of this evening's progrsam:

Bramwell Tovey conducts Bernstein and Sibelius

Tanglewood 

Koussevitzky Music Shed - Lenox, MA - View Map

British conductor Bramwell Tovey leads the BSO in a program that pays tribute to Bernstein as both conductor and composer. First, the orchestra is joined by a cast of outstanding singers-soprano Nadine Sierra, mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, mezzo-soprano Kelley O'Connor, tenor Nicholas Phan, baritone Elliot Madore, and bass Eric Owens- for Bernstein's celebratory orchestral song cycle Songfest, composed for the American Bicentennial in 1976. Then, Mr. Tovey leads the BSO in Sibelius's sweeping Symphony No. 2, a staple of Bernstein's conducting repertory.

(Some emphasis added.)

I've never heard the "Songfest," so I don't know how it will be. The Sibelius is music I like. Unfortunately, it will be played during my brother's weekly call from Japan, but you can enjoy it.


Sunday, August 5, 2018.  Apparently the staff ran out of time: the synopsis on the program detail page has a typo and is, as Joe Friday would say, "just the facts," and there are no audio previews for two of the three pieces. Here's what they say:

Dima Slobodeniouk conducts Borodin, Wieniawski and Prokofiev featuring Joshua Bell 

Tanglewood 

Koussevitzky Music Shed - Lenox, MA - View Map

Conductor Dima Slobodeniouk makes his BSO debut Sunday, August 5, leading the orchestra in Borodin's Poloytsian [sic] Dances, Wieniawski's Violin Concerto No. 2, featuring Joshua Bell, and Prokofiev's Symphony No. 5. 

(Some emphasis added.)

The Borodin has long been a staple of the classical radio playlists, so I guess it's pretty popular, but it's not one of my favorites. On the other hand, I have no recollection of the other two pieces, although I may have heard the Prokofiev before. After reading the program note for the Wieniawski, I'm definitely looking forward to hearing it. I'm sure Joshua Bell will give a great performance. The BSO debut of the conductor adds interest to the concert.


In summary, there is music I definitely want to hear, and music I don't care about, but nothing I'm planning to avoid altogether. Hear it all through the on line and on air facilities of WCRB — Friday and Saturday live at 8:00 p.m. RDST, and Sunday via tape delay at 7:00 p.m. Also note all their other offerings, as linked on their webpage.