REVIEW: Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, "3 Season End Concerts"

Tanglewood, Lenox, MA

www.bso.org/tanglewood

August 4, 11, & 18, 2025

by Michael J. Moran

The last three TMCO concerts gave the two 2025 TMC conducting fellows two more chances to share the podium with Boston Symphony Orchestra guest conductors and a unique opportunity to co-conduct a one-act opera.

Leonard Weiss, photo by Hilary Scott

That was a magical semi-staged TMC production of Maurice Ravel’s 1925 “The Child and the Spells," of which Leonard Weiss led the first half and Yiran Zhao, the second. In a pre-concert talk, renowned soprano Dawn Upshaw, the lead TMC faculty organizer of the event, called the opera “a series of life lessons.” A seven-year-old boy rebels against doing his homework by harming objects and animals around him, who realize, when he bandages a baby squirrel he’s wounded, that, in Colette’s libretto, “he is a good child after all.” TMC vocal fellows and instrumentalists responded with equal sensitivity and charm to Weiss’ suave, elegant leadership and to Zhao’s more overtly emotional conducting style.

Ravel, photo by Hilary Scott

A week later, Zhao opened the program with a soulful reading of BSO composer Carlos Simon’s BSO commission, “Four Black American Dances,” sharply differentiating the “Ring Shout,” “Waltz,” “Tap!,” and “Holy Dance.” Weiss followed with a lively account of Sergei Prokofiev’s “Classical” symphony, featuring a spacious “Allegro,” a warm “Larghetto,” a stately “Gavotte,” and a brisk “Finale.” Colombian-born conductor Andres Orozco-Estrada closed the concert with a colorful take on Ravel’s orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky’s piano suite “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Standout numbers included: a haunting “Old Castle;” a playful “Ballet of Chicks in Their Shells; and a majestic “Great Gate at Kiev.”

Weiss opened the August 18 concert with a carefully shaped “Chairman Dances: Foxtrot for Orchestra,” an “out-take” from John Adams’ 1987 opera “Nixon in China.” Zhao next led an exuberant rendition of Bartok’s Hungarian-flavored 1923 “Dance Suite.” Finnish conductor Dima Slobodeniouk closed the program with an electrifying performance of Tchaikovsky’s dramatic fourth symphony. The orchestra played an anguished “Andante-Moderato,” a melancholy “Andantino,” a sprightly “Scherzo,” and a whirlwind “Finale” with passion and poise.  

At the end of every 2025 TMCO concert with three conductors, the guest conductor has brought out the TMC conducting fellows for a group bow (and hug), a respectful gesture that literally embraces them as peers in the making.

REVIEW: Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, "4 Concerts"

Tanglewood, Lenox, MA

www.bso.org/tanglewood

July 7, 14, 24 & 28, 2025

by Michael J. Moran

Yiran Zhao, Photo: Hilary Scott

Each summer over 100 young musicians starting their careers, from across and beyond the US, gather for eight weeks at Tanglewood, where, tutored by Boston Symphony Orchestra members and visiting artists, they soon begin to sound as if they’ve been playing together for years. Four recent concerts by 2025’s TMCO confirmed the power of this training model.    

TMC conducting fellows Australian Leonard Weiss and American Yiran Zhao shared leadership duties at these concerts with BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons (July 7) and BSO guest conductor Thomas Ades (July 14).

Weiss opened the first concert with an alternately stirring and reflective account of “The High Castle,” the first of six tone poems in Czech composer Bedrich Smetana’s 1874-79 cycle “My Country.” Zhao followed with a colorful and dramatic reading of “The Moldau,” also from “My Country.” Nelsons closed the program with a buoyant rendition of Johannes Brahms’ 1877 second symphony, including a mercurial “Allegro non troppo,” serene “Adagio non troppo,” charming “Allegretto grazioso,” and exuberant “Allegro con spirito” finale.

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As part of Tanglewood’s celebration of French composer Maurice Ravel’s 150th birth anniversary this year, Weiss began the second concert with a sensitive take on the Suite from Ravel’s fanciful 1911 ballet, “Mother Goose.” Zhao led a sweeping second suite from Ravel’s more opulent score of the same year for his ballet “Daphnis and Chloe.” Ades drew laser-focused playing from the TMCO that made Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet “The Rite of Spring” sound strikingly modern.

The focus of the 2025 Festival of Contemporary Music was on Mexican music, and FCM Director Gabriela Ortiz included many pieces by her teachers, herself, and her students on its five programs. Highlights of the July 24 opening concert were: Ortiz’s eerily evocative “Rio Bravo,” featuring TMC fellows Danielle Romano, mezzo-soprano, and three percussionists “playing” six tuned wine glasses; and her student Diana Syrse’s pop-inflected “My Song,” with Syrse declaiming her own text and 13 assorted instrumentalists led with verve by Zhao.

On July 28, Zhao and Weiss led the TMCO in mesmerizing works by Gabriella Smith and Ellen Reid. BSO conductor Thomas Wilkins closed the FCM with two powerful works by Ortiz, her “Altar of the Wind” (with sensational solos by Mexican flutist Alejandro Escuer) and “Hominum: Concerto for Orchestra.” These young musicians sounded completely at home playing this often technically demanding and wildly imaginative music.

TMCO concerts continue through August 18.

REVIEW: Tanglewood, "Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra Series"

Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood, Lenox, MA

www.bso.org/tanglewood

August 5, 12, & 19, 2024

by Michael J. Moran

The last three TMCO concerts presented the two 2024 TMC conducting fellows with new opportunities: vocal music, contemporary works, and replacing a missing conductor.

On August 5, TMC fellow Na’Zir McFadden led a touchingly vivid account of Maurice Ravel’s four-movement 1920 tribute to victims of World War I, “Le Tombeau de Couperin.” TMC fellow Ross Jamie Collins shaped a brilliant reading of Silvestre Revueltas’s 1938 tone poem “Sensemaya,” which fully captured its ritualistic Afro-Latin sensuality. American BSO guest conductor Alan Gilbert skillfully guided the TMCO through the complex rhythms and shifting colors of Henri Dutilleux’s 1964 “Metaboles” (“Transformations”), making this challenging piece surprisingly accessible. He then poked hilarious fun at himself and the audience with a playful rendition of Joseph Haydn’s 1788 Symphony No. 90, with its several surprise endings.      

Photo by Hillary Scott

A week later, the TMC conducting fellows led 12 TMC vocal fellows in excerpts from “The
Magic Flute,” “Don Giovanni,” and “The Marriage of Figaro” for a delightful “Mozart Opera Evening.” Collins cued the singers and instrumentalists more extravagantly than McFadden, whose more economical gestures drew equally compelling performances. Standouts included: soprano Emily Rocha’s devastating “Ach, ich fuhl’s” (“Ah, I feel it”) as a hopeless Pamina in “The Magic Flute;” a seductive “La ci darem la mano” (“Give me your hand”) from baritone John Arlievsky as a suave Don Giovanni and mezzo-soprano Anna Maria Vacca as a befuddled Zerlina; and a hilarious “Voi, che sapete” (“You who know”) by mezzo-soprano Carmen Edano as a lovestruck teenage Cherubino in “The Marriage of Figaro.” English subtitles were helpfully projected above the stage.

 

McFadden and Collins faced a new challenge on August 19, when Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu, who would have led Sergei Prokofiev’s 1945 fifth symphony, cancelled his Tanglewood appearances due to a recent leg injury. Their ingenious solution was for each of them to lead two of its four movements. McFadden’s more restrained conducting style produced a vibrant first movement (“Andante”) and a haunting third (“Adagio”), while Collins’s flashier style inspired a driving second movement (“Allegro moderato”) and an exuberant finale (“Allegro giocoso”). The result was a powerfully cohesive vision of the Russian composer’s heroic masterpiece.

That concert opened with Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz’s six-minute folk-inflected 2021 “Kauyumari” (“Blue Deer”), representing a spiritual guide for the Huichol people of Mexico, in a visceral reading under McFadden. Next came a sensitive account, also under McFadden, of British-American composer Bernard Rands’s equally brief but bracing “Adieu,” for brass quintet and string orchestra, in honor of the composer’s recent 90th birthday. The program’s first half concluded with an electrifying Collins-led rendition by the TMCO of Jean Sibelius’s 1892 tone poem “En Saga,” evoking the spirit of Finnish folklore.

The past eight weeks of intensive concerts, professional training, and musical camaraderie, including their major role in the annual Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, will surely be formative experiences in these young musicians’ careers.   

REVIEW: Tanglewood, "Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra Concerts"

Tanglewood, Lenox, MA

www.bso.org/tanglewood

July 8 & 15, 2024

by Michael J. Moran

Na'Zir McFadden

Each summer over a hundred young musicians starting their careers, from across and beyond the United States, gather for eight weeks at Tanglewood, where, tutored by Boston Symphony Orchestra members and visiting artists, they soon begin to sound as if they’ve been playing together for years. The first two concerts by 2024’s TMCO strongly affirmed the value of this training model.    

TMC conducting fellows Finnish-British Ross Jamie Collins and American Na’Zir McFadden
shared leadership duties at these concerts with BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons (July 8, in the Koussevitzky Music Shed) and BSO guest conductor Dima Slobodeniouk (July 15, in Ozawa Hall)). Collins opened the first concert with a thrilling account of Antonin Dvorak’s exuberant 1892 “Carnival” Overture. McFadden followed with a dramatic reading of African-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s dynamic 1898 Ballade in A minor.

Nelsons closed the program with a powerful rendition of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1937 fifth symphony, whose immediate success restored the composer to the good graces of Soviet authorities after harsh official criticism of his popular opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.” A haunting “Moderato” opening was followed by a sarcastically humorous “Allegretto,” a deeply moving “Largo,” and a potent mix of jubilation and doubt in the “Allegro non troppo” finale.   

  

Ross Jamie Collins

Ross began the second concert with a perceptive take on African-American composer Julia Perry’s 1952 “Study for Orchestra,” sharply characterizing the frequent mood shifts in this brief, mercurial piece. McFadden led a sweeping performance of a symphonic suite that Leonard Bernstein extracted from his score for the 1954 film “On the Waterfront,” which displayed a jazzier sensibility than most of his Broadway and classical works.    

Slobodeniouk, a regular BSO guest with Finnish-Russian roots, concluded the program with two rarities by Igor Stravinsky. Twenty-three members of the TMCO’s woodwind and brass sections expressed the austere sonorities of the 10-minute “Symphonies of Wind Instruments,” written in 1920 and revised in 1947, with piercing clarity. The full TMCO found more warmth and drama in Stravinsky’s 1945 “Symphony in Three Movements,” which includes music he had written for several abandoned film projects while living in Los Angeles during that period.  

Upcoming TMCO concerts in Ozawa Hall at 8pm will pair TMC conducting fellows with BSO guest conductors Alan Gilbert (August 5) and Hannu Lintu (August 19).

REVIEW: Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, "Two Concerts, Four Conductors"

Tanglewood, Lenox, MA 

www.bso.org/tanglewood

August 7 & 14, 2023 

by Michael J. Moran 

The two latest TMCO concerts offered, among other pleasures, an object lesson in four different styles of leading an orchestra. 

Agata Zayca photo by Hilary Scott

Polish TMC conducting fellow Agata Zajac opened the August 7 concert with a daringly dark interpretation of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s 1909 symphonic poem “The Isle of the Dead,” inspired by Arnold Bocklin’s painting of a coffin being rowed to a small island. The TMCO conveyed the nostalgic theme of life, the shattering climax of grief, and the mournful rocking of the boat with feverish intensity. Zajac brought similar range a week later to Antonin Dvorak’s 1897 tone poem “Wood Dove.” The TMCO rendered every twist in this grim Czech folktale (a wife poisons her husband, happily marries another, then kills herself from remorse) with vivid conviction. 

Zajac’s Canadian counterpart, Armand Birks, led Maurice Ravel’s beloved 1928 “Bolero” with sinuous flair on August 7. The TMCO luxuriated in this “long, very gradual crescendo” (Ravel’s description) with obvious enjoyment. A week later Birks found atmospheric and emotional resonance in the “Four Sea Interludes” for orchestra from Benjamin Britten’s 1945 opera “Peter Grimes,” about an outcast fisherman in 19th-century England. Most notable were a haunting “Moonlight” and an impassioned closing “Storm.”

 

Internationally acclaimed Russian-born conductor Dima Slobodeniouk closed the first concert with an exhilarating performance of Jean Sibelius’s 1902 second symphony. The conductor’s training and experience in the composer’s native Finland seemed to infuse a restless “Allegretto,” defiant “Tempo Andante, ma rubato,” headlong “Vivacissimo,” and stirring “Finale: Allegro moderato.”

 

British conductor and musicologist Dame Jane Glover closed the second concert with a similarly inspired account of Johannes Brahms’s 1877 second symphony. Though considered his sunniest symphony, Glover and the TMCO discovered melancholy undercurrents in the first two movements, a flowing “Allegro non troppo” and a tender “Adagio non troppo,” but only joy in a buoyant “Allegretto grazioso (quasi Andantino)” and an ecstatic “Allegro con spirito.”

 

Slobodeniouk and Zayac are full-body conductors, who move around the podium and often bend their legs or even jump (think Leonard Bernstein). Glover and Birks are more restrained in their movements, using mainly their arms and batons for communication. All make eloquent use of facial expressions to convey their wishes, and all show outstanding rapport with their musicians. At Tanglewood, the legacy and future of classical music looks secure.