MUSIC: Strategic Sounds at Tanglewood

Every summer, music lovers and initiates alike are faced with an abundance of choices at Tanglewood—nearly a hundred concerts from which to choose. The season brochure runs to twenty-four pages, and it reads like a college course catalog (sans requirements).

There is method to the seeming madness of the programming at the Shed and Ozawa Hall; divining that method, however, can be an elusive task. And once the code is cracked, a concertgoer is still left with having to design his own course of action, or, more precisely, course of concerts. Short of moving to the Lenox, Massachusetts, campus (which isn’t allowed) and attending every single performance (which isn’t advised on the grounds of maintaining one’s sanity, musical or otherwise), a strategy is required in order to make sense of the multitudinous musical possibilities.

One such approach is to immerse oneself in the works of specific composers with whom one is already familiar or others whose acquaintance has yet to be made. This summer in particular, Tanglewood makes this approach easier, with no fewer than eight programs devoted to the works of single composers. For example, Boston Symphony Orchestra music director James Levine kicks off the summer music festival proper on July 3 in a concert featuring music by the crowd-friendly Tchaikovsky, including his Symphony No. 6, Pathetique, and his Piano Concerto No. 1, featuring all-star soloist Yefim Bronfman.
 

Following on the heels of the all-Tchaikovsky program is a festival-within-a-festival featuring the works of the ever-popular Beethoven. Beginning on Sunday, July 5, and continuing on July 7 and 9, violinist Christian Tetzlaff and pianist Alexander Lonquich will attempt nothing less than a run-through of the complete cycle of Beethoven’s sonatas for violin and piano, ten works in all, in Ozawa Hall. As if Tetzlaff won’t already have his hands full with the Beethoven, he’ll warm up his fingers on the afternoon of July 5 by accompanying the BSO for Brahms’s Violin Concerto in the Shed.
 

Other works by Beethoven are scattered throughout the season, including Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli, op. 120, performed by Stephen Kovacevich in Ozawa Hall on July 2; the Piano Concerto No. 4, performed by Emanuel Ax with the BSO in the Shed on July 10; the Egmont Overture by the BSO on July 12; the Violin Concerto, performed by Vadim Repin with the BSO, on July 31; the Piano Concerto No. 3 featuring Leif Ove Andsnes with the BSO on August 2; the Symphony No. 4 on August 15, featuring the BSO under the baton of André Previn, celebrating his eightieth birthday this summer; the Symphony No. 1 conducted by Kurt Masur on August 21; and the traditional curtain-closer, Symphony No. 9, featuring guest conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus under the direction of John Oliver, on August 23. And as if that weren’t enough, Ludwig lovers will be treated to a world-premiere dance performance by the Mark Morris Dance Group choreographed to Beethoven’s Sonata No. 4 in C for cello and piano, op. 102, No. 1, featuring a couple of soloists named Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax, on August 5 and 6.

If Beethoven’s just a little too avant-garde for your tastes, and  you prefer the reassuring sounds of Mozart (you know, the guy from Amadeus), fear not. Your Mozart season begins on Friday, July 17, when Leon Fleisher and the BSO under the direction of James Levine tackle the Piano Concerto No. 23 in A, K. 488, two days before a Sunday afternoon all-Mozart program, again conducted by Levine, featuring three symphonies—39, 40, and 41, this last also known as Jupiter. The heavenly sounds of Mozart continue on July 26, 27, and 29, when the Tanglewood Music Center under the direction of Levine stages the opera Don Giovanni. Sir James Galway’s flute will be featured on Saturday, August 1, in performances of Mozart’s Overture to The Magic Flute and his Flute Concerto No. 2, on an evening celebrating Galway’s seventieth birthday. Mozart also shows up on the program on August 21, when David Fray is featured with the BSO in a performance of his Piano Concerto No. 25 in C., K. 503.
 

Going further back in classical music history, the works of Franz Joseph Haydn will get their due beginning on Sunday, June 28, when the Juilliard String Quartet performs nothing but quartets by Haydn for several hours that afternoon, in a concert marking the farewell performance of the Juilliard Quartet’s first violinist, Joel Smirnoff.

Haydn also shows up on the Mark Morris bill on August 5 and 6, when Papa’s Horn Concerto No. 2 will propel Morris’s A Lake, and again on August 21, when the BSO under Kurt Masur plays his Symphony No. 88 (the “Father of the Symphony” begat one hundred and eight in toto).
 

This being the Felix Mendelssohn bicentennial year, the BSO has set aside the entire evening program on August 22 to perform the composer’s works, including The Hebrides (Fingal’s Cave) Overture; Symphony No. 4, Italian; and the Violin Concerto, featuring Gil Shaham. Music by the grandson of the great Jewish philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn, can also be heard in chamber music concerts at Ozawa Hall on Sunday, July 19, August 2, and August 16.
 

Johannes Brahms—sometimes referred to as the anti-Wagner—is another nineteenth-century composer being given the full-scale treatment; his work will be showcased on the afternoon of Sunday, August 16, when Kurt Masur conducts the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in his Symphony No. 2 and Piano Concerto No. 2, featuring soloist Garrick Ohlsson. Brahms’s Violin Concerto is included on the program on July 5, with soloist Christian Tetzlaff accompanying the BSO under Levine’s baton, and on July 10, when Herbert Blomstedt conducts the BSO in his Symphony No. 4. On July 25, Levine leads the BSO and baritone Matthias Goerne in a rendition of Brahms’s controversial German Requiem.

To some it contains the most exquisite choral music of his century; to others, including the playwright George Bernard Shaw, it was something less—Shaw wrote about Brahms’s memorial to his mother that it can be borne patiently only by the corpse. Don’t overlook the Ozawa Hall concert on August 12 by the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, featuring André Previn in Brahms’s Quintet in F minor for piano and strings, op. 34.
 

A couple of twentieth-century composers get nights all to themselves, including Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, whose Swan of Tuonela, Tapiola, and Second Symphony will be performed by the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra under the direction of Herbert Blomstedt in Ozawa Hall on June 29. Not to be outdone, Igor Stravinsky, the Pablo Picasso of musical modernism, is the only composer featured on August 3, when Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos conducts the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra and Vocal Fellows in the complete Pulcinella, originally commissioned for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, based on eighteenth-century pieces by Pergolesi.

The program also includes the Suite from The Firebird, an early ballet, and his Concerto for Piano and Winds, featuring the Berkshires’ own Peter Serkin on piano. Levine conducts the BSO in Stravinsky’s scandalous success, The Rite of Spring, on July 5, and, in a rare turn, choreographer Mark Morris will conduct the Tanglewood Music Center Instrumental and Vocal Fellows in Stravinsky’s short opera, Renard, on July 28. Works by Stravinsky can also be heard in a chamber music concert in Ozawa Hall on the morning of July 19.
 

Sometimes a single work by a single composer is enough to draw a listener to Tanglewood. Fans of Dvo˘rák, for example, will want to attend the Emerson String Quartet’s program on June 26, when they will perform the Czech composer’s Quartet No. 12 in F, op. 96, The American, and String Quintet No. 3 in E-flat, op. 97, American. Joshua Bell will team with the BSO on July 12 to perform the Violin Concerto No. 1 by Max Bruch, a German Romantic more in the vein of Brahms than Wagner. The Sixth Symphony by Gustav Mahler, who said a symphony must contain “a world,” will be performed by the BSO under Levine on July 17.

Berlioz and Mussorgsky each get two works performed by the BSO under Levine on July 24, and Aaron Copland’s complete Appalachian Spring, written as a ballet for Martha Graham and featuring variations on the Shaker folk song, “Simple Gifts,” will get a hearing under Leonard Slatkin’s baton on August 1.
 

Adventurous listeners can piece together several performances of works by Charles Ives, including the Quartet No. 1 performed by the Emerson String Quartet in Ozawa Hall on June 26; Three Places in New England, performed by the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in Ozawa Hall on July 20; songs by baritone Thomas Hampson and pianist Craig Rutenberg on July 22; Thanksgiving and Forefather’s Day for chorus and orchestra, by the BSO and Tanglewood Festival Chorus under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas, on August 23; and a world premiere of a new dance choreographed by Mark Morris to Ives’s Trio for piano, violin, and cello, featuring soloists Emanuel Ax, Colin Jacobsen, and Yo-Yo Ma, respectively, on August 5 and 6.
 

And then there’s always the dive-bomb approach—the result of browsing the Tanglewood brochure and honing in on a specific program or single work that you think you have to hear. That’s how I feel about the program on Saturday, July 11, when James Levine conducts the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra and a ton of singers in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Act III, in the Shed, and the July 20 Ozawa Hall concert, where Stefan Asbury conducts the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in Strauss’s Metamorphosen, Schoenberg’s Lied der Waldtaube, and Darius Milhaud’s La Création du monde.

The BSO’s July 24 concert, which includes Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition—sections of which have appeared everywhere from Warner Brothers’ cartoons to the Coen Brothers’ film, The Big Lebowski, and in recordings by Method Man and Michael Jackson, and, most famously, in a version by British progressive-rock group Emerson, Lake and Palmer—is also a must-hear. Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1 would be worth hearing any time, but on August 9 the BSO will be joined by Yo-Yo Ma on lead.
 

This summer’s Festival of Contemporary Music boasts a much more eclectic program than in recent seasons. The Tanglewood Music Center Fellows will wrestle with Bang on a Can cofounder David Lang’s Illumination Rounds on August 7, John Corigliano’s Snapshot: Circa 1909 on August 8, and John Zorn’s Contes de Fées on August 10. Be there or be square. (JUNE 2009)

Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living’s editor-in-chief and award-winning music critic.

THE GOODS

Tanglewood
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Lenox, Mass.
888.266.1200
www.tanglewood.org

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY BSO: From top, violinist Christian Tetzlaff; violinist Vadim Repin; pianist Leif Ove Andsnes; conductor Kurt Masur; conductor Herbert Blomstedt; baritone Matthias Goerne; choreographer Mark Morris; baritone Thomas Hampson; and conductor Leonard Slatkin.