Tanglewood, Lenox, MA
August 7, 13 & 14, 2025
by Michael J. Moran
The last three concerts in Tanglewood’s Ozawa Hall series broadened the range and repertoire offered in several earlier concerts during the 2025 season.
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| AMOC, photo by Hilary Scott |
On August 7, the American Modern Opera Company, under composer/conductor Matthew Aucoin, presented Aucoin’s 2025 one-act opera “Music for New Bodies.” Set to poems by Jorie Graham and imaginatively staged by renowned director Peter Sellars, its five scenes reflect poignantly on surviving a cancer diagnosis and planetary destruction. The adventurous score makes protean demands on five singers, 18 instrumentalists, and electronics. High soprano Song Hee Lee, soprano Meryl Dominguez, mezzo-soprano Megan Moore, tenor Paul Appleby, and bass-baritone Evan Hughes met the challenge, though often singing in motion and sometimes lying prone on platforms across the stage. The stunning performance made a powerful impact.
Six days later, string quartet Brooklyn Rider celebrated their 20th anniversary in a concert that highlighted their eclectic programming taste. The group opened with ensemble violinist Colin Jacobson’s touching tribute to ethnomusicologist Ruth Crawford Seeger, “A Short While To Be Here…,” based on the American folk song “Little Birdie.” Next came Reena Esmail’s haunting “Zeher” (“Poison”), followed by Philip Glass’s hypnotic third string quartet. With special guest Yo-Yo Ma on second cello, they closed with a rhapsodic account of Schubert’s sublime last work, the 1828 String Quintet in C. Their heartfelt encore, an arrangement for quintet (with a juicy solo for Ma) of Osvaldo Golijov’s song “Lua Descolorida” (“Colorless Moon”) delighted the capacity audience, including the composer.
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| Sixteen, photo by Hilary Scott |
The next evening, pioneering British choristers, the Sixteen, and the conductor who founded them in, Harry Christophers, offered a stimulating program of 12 choral works by 12th century Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, Tudor era English composers William Byrd and Thomas Tallis, and contemporary Estonian composer Arvo Part. In shifting combinations, the soprano, alto, tenor, and bass voices of the ensemble blended with perfect intonation, seamless balance, and ravishing warmth. Standout selections included: Hildegard’s stark “Ave, Generosa” (“Hail, high-born lady”); Part’s sonorous “Da pacem, Domine” (“Give Peace, Lord”); and Byrd’s resonant “Tribue, Domine” (“Grant, Lord”).
A gorgeous encore, Byrd’s motet “Diliges Dominum” (“You Shall Love the Lord”), in which two halves of the chorus sing the same music exactly in reverse, brought another varied Ozawa Hall season to a virtuosic close.
