Classical shines at Tanglewood’s summer fest
LENOX, MASS.— In just over a week, Toronto Summer Music will pack up its scores for the season. Elsewhere, the festival season goes on, especially on a sylvan site in Western Massachusetts known as Tanglewood.
Tanglewood is the grandaddy of this continent’s major summer music festivals, the oldest, largest and most famous. This is where Leonard Bernstein studied conducting with Serge Koussevitzky and where Seiji Ozawa, one of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s most popular music directors, studied conducting with Bernstein.
Most significantly of all, this is the summer home of one of the world’s great symphonic ensembles, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, whose members come to play, to teach and to be bitten by mosquitoes.
Yes, most of the concerts take place in quasi-outdoor settings: the roofed 5,000-plus-seat Shed, and the roofed and side-walled 1,150-seat Ozawa Hall, both of whose backs open to sprawling lawns where corks are popped and chicken legs consumed to the accompaniment of Beethoven and Brahms.
It is said, in fact, that when Ozawa Hall (named in honour of the Japanese maestro who was music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for a record 29 years) opened in 2004, it boasted surrounding lawns gently sloped to enable a wine glass to preserve its verticality.
Tanglewood takes its name from an estate deeded to the orchestra back in the 1930s, although Garrison Keillor of A Prairie Home Companion fame insists the name was coined by the Indians after watching the settlers play golf.
By whatever name, it is a magical place, especially during the recently concluded weeklong Festival of Contemporary Music, when students, faculty, composers and listeners form a temporary community immersed in the sounds of our time.
Arnold Schoenberg allegedly said that his music wasn’t really modern, it was badly performed. At the Tanglewood Music Centre, celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, the music of the 20th and 21st centuries is performed at a level Schoenberg might have marvelled at.
In concert after concert I heard audiences in Ozawa Hall cheer music of daunting complexity, which had been so carefully prepared that its message was nevertheless communicated.
And at the end of the week, Michael Tilson Thomas joined a trio of student conductors in leading the Tanglewood Music Centre Orchestra in a performance of Charles Ives’ New England Holidays that would have been virtually unimaginable in the composer’s day.
But of course, to most people, Tanglewood means primarily concerts by the Boston Symphony, which typically take place on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. During my visit I heard all-Beethoven and all-Mozart programs conducted by Ernst von Dohnanyi as well as a program highlighted by Mahler’s Fifth Symphony conducted by Tilson Thomas.
It was earlier in the year in the orchestra’s wonderful winter home, Symphony Hall, that I heard another Mahler symphony, the Sixth, led by its new music director, Latvia’s Andris Nelsons, and I can’t remember ever having heard the orchestra play more beautifully.
Nelsons, together with the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Gustavo Dudamel of Venezuela and the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Canadian maestro Yannick Nezet-Seguin, numbers among the most talkedabout baton wavers of the 30-something generation and it is easy to understand why.
Music pours out of these men, energizing players and listeners alike.
So the omens look good for the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the years ahead and, as in years past, Tanglewood promises to play a major role, drawing 300,000 people to its seasonal concerts, some of whom wouldn’t think of passing through the Massachusetts Ave. doors of Symphony Hall.
When Serge Koussevitzky founded the festival, part of his motivation was to give more weeks of work to his players.
Now almost all North American orchestras with 52-week seasons — the New York Philharmonic being an obvious exception — count on having a summer home.
Over the years, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra has investigated the possibility of acquiring such a home, one of the proposed sites being in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., to be operated in partnership with the National Arts Centre Orchestra. So far, the cost has been deemed discouraging.
If and when the project receives a go-ahead, there surely isn’t a better model to be emulated than Tanglewood, where the beauties of nature, the aims of education and the rewards of world-class music-making combine to make summer the best of seasons.