REVIEW: Boston Symphony Orchestra, "A Tanglewood Weekend"

Tanglewood, Lenox, MA

www.bso.org/tanglewood

August 17-18, 2024

by Michael J. Moran

Three of the 12 music experiences offered last weekend at Tanglewood highlighted the multi-faceted approach this leader of summer festivals takes to presenting, promoting, and preserving classical music.

Saturday afternoon featured the last of six concerts in Ozawa Hall by the Young Artists Orchestra of the Boston University Tanglewood Institute (a younger version of Tanglewood Music Center training program). Conductor Justin Casinghino led the musicians, ages 14-20, in a colorful reading of 18-year-old BUTI composer Billy Waldman’s “Stellification,” which depicted how a planet becomes a star. This was followed by a fiery account of Gustav Mahler’s sprawling 1902 fifth symphony under Paul Haas’ dynamic baton. They played both demanding scores with a maturity and professionalism that belied their youth.

Later that day, the Linde Center hosted an enlightening lecture by Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) violist emeritus and Holocaust music scholar Mark Ludwig on “Trauma, Memory & Transcendence in Music.” It included Ludwig's video interview of composer Osvaldo Golijov about his song cycle “Falling Out of Time,” based on Israeli writer David Grossman’s novel of that name on the death of his son in the Lebanon War; and a moving performance by BSO members Si-Jing Huang and Takumi Taguchi, violins; Steven O. Laraia, viola; and Adam Esbensen, cello; of the third string quartet by Czech composer Viktor Ullmann. This was written in the Terezin concentration camp shortly before Ullmann's execution at Auschwitz in 1944. With these and other sources, Ludwig perceptively showed how music can lift the human spirit from profound grief to unexpected joy.  

Photo by Hilary Scott

An overflow BSO audience on Sunday afternoon found joy in the return of Yo-Yo Ma to the Shed after Covid forced the renowned cellist to cancel last summer. Before soloing in Robert Schumann’s poignant 1850 cello concerto, the ever-genial Ma thanked maestro Earl Lee, also a cellist, for his three years as BSO Assistant Conductor and asked him why he likes Schumann’s music. Lee’s answer: its “emotional conflict,” a quality well captured by the full, rich tone and trademark depth of feeling in Ma’s impassioned playing, with committed support from Lee and the BSO.      

The concert opened with Carlos Simon’s 2020 "Fate Now Conquers,” modestly introduced by the composer as a “riff” on Beethoven’s seventh symphony. The five-minute piece’s title quotes a Beethoven diary entry, based on which Simon remixes fragments of the symphony’s “Allegretto” second movement to suggest “the unpredictable ways of fate.” Lee and the BSO gave the mercurial work a playful and dynamic spin.  

Their thrilling performance of Beethoven’s 1813 symphony recalled the grace, humor, and verve of Leonard Bernstein’s classic BSO/Tanglewood performance in his last concert 34 years ago. Throughout the symphony, those in the Shed seemed to be having great fun, from a Berkshire wren loudly chirping along with the Allegretto in its ceiling perch. An instant standing ovation suggested that there’s no better way to end a typically varied and historic weekend at Tanglewood.