Tanglewood, Lenox, MA
July 26, 2024
by Michael J. Moran
First came an insightful conversation before a packed house in the Linde Center’s Studio E, with music scholar Harlow Robinson, NPR radio host Tom Godell, and Koussevitzky biographer Victor Yuzefovich, who turned 600 boxes of scattered memorabilia into the Library of Congress’s Serge Koussevitzky archive. Clips of Koussevitzky speaking and excerpts from his BSO recordings conveyed his charismatic personality, his transformative effect on the BSO, and his championship of new music, especially by American composers. Russian-born Yuzefovich, while assisted by Boston-based translator Olga Birioukova, quipped that he speaks better English than Koussevitzky ever did.
Koussevitzky’s legacy as a double bass virtuoso before he became a conductor was showcased at the evening’s “Prelude” concert in Ozawa Hall, where BSO double bassists Carl Anderson and Benjamin Levy demonstrated the unwieldy instrument’s versatility in Giovanni Bottesini’s lively “Gran Duetto No. 3.” Levy joined BSO violinist Bonnie Bewick for a rollicking “Three Forks of Cheat,” based on a West Virgina fiddle tune. With BSO colleagues Danny Kim, viola, and Mickey Katz, cello, they revelled in Bewick’s arrangement of Bottesini’s “Tarantella” for double bass and string trio. The trio’s sprightly take on Erno Dohnanyi’s “Serenade” opened the concert.
The evening’s main event in the Music Shed highlighted its namesake’s small but notable output as a composer with Koussevitzky’s rarely heard 1903 concerto for double bass and orchestra. BSO principal double bass Edwin Barker and his colleagues under their Music Director Andris Nelsons played the 20-minute Tchaikovsky-influenced showpiece with technical polish and Romantic bravado. The concert opener, an evocative account of Steven Mackey’s colorful 2013 “Urban Ocean,” which Mackey introduced as depicting the mysterious interaction of the sea with humanity, recalled Koussevitzky’s legendary support for American composers.
The program closed with lesser-known pieces by two Koussevitzky contemporaries whose music he especially favored. Jean Sibelius drew on Finnish mythology for his 1902 “The Origin of Fire,” for baritone, men’s chorus, and orchestra. Alexander Scriabin based his version of the story on Greek mythology in his 1910 “Prometheus, Poem of Fire,” for piano, chorus, and orchestra, which Koussevitzky premiered in Moscow, with the composer at the piano. Will Liverman was a forceful soloist in Sibelius, and Yefim Bronfman, seductive at the keyboard in Scriabin. Nelsons, the BSO, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, prepared by their conductor, James Burton, offered sumptuous backing in both these fascinating scores.
More background information is available at the BSO’s Koussevitzky 150th anniversary website: https://www.bso.org/exhibits/koussevitzky-150th-anniversary
