REVIEW: Tanglewood 2020 Online Festival, Week Four

Tanglewood 2020 Online Festival
www.bso.org
July 20-26, 2020
by Michael J. Moran

During the fourth week of its virtual 2020 season, Tanglewood offered exciting video streams of three educational programs and six concerts, as well as a wide-ranging concert audio stream.

Tuesday’s “Tanglewood Learning Institute Celebrates Beethoven” episode featured Nicholas Kitchen, first violinist of the Boston-based Borromeo String Quartet. In an absorbing recorded lecture, which included performances by the Quartet of two Beethoven quartet movements, and a recent Zoom chat with TLI Director Sue Elliott, he used score-writer software to illustrate the remarkable variety and subtlety of the expressive markings in Beethoven’s late quartets. 

Astrid Schween

TLI’s Wednesday masterclass presented Juilliard String Quartet cellist (and Tanglewood Music Center faculty member) Astrid Schween coaching three TMC cello fellows in Bach cello suite movements as recorded earlier this month without audience in Studio E of the Linde Center for Music and Learning at Tanglewood. Schween was warm and insightful with the students and in a subsequent Zoom conversation with TMC Associate Director Michael Nock.

Thursday’s “TLI ShopTalks” program found Elliott jointly Zoom-interviewing two young star singers: African-American soprano Nicole Cabell; and Asian-American tenor Nicholas Phan. In responding also to live-chat audience questions, they recounted their musical beginnings, addressed the different vocal demands of opera performance and recital singing, and expressed lively opinions about how to increase diversity in the classical music field.

Monday evening’s TMC orchestra concert showcased 2016 performances which had “irresistible energy” and “edge-of-the-seat” intensity of the Brahms first piano concerto (with English pianist Paul Lewis and Boston Symphony Music Director Andris Nelsons) and Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe Suite #2 (under Stephane Deneve). In an intermission Zoom chat with TMC Conducting Head Stefan Asbury, Lewis described this youthful orchestra with the quoted words above.  
  
Recorded last week in Studio E without audience for Wednesday evening’s “Recitals from the World Stage” concert, the adventurous string quartet Brooklyn Rider were edgy in new music by Caroline Shaw, Matana Roberts, and Philip Glass, and cooler in Beethoven’s “Holy Song of Thanksgiving for a Convalescent” than the Borromeo on Monday. Spoken introductions by three of the musicians added a welcome personal touch.  

Thursday evening’s “virtual gala” tribute to Ukrainian-born violinist Isaac Stern on his 100th birthday anniversary comprised performance excerpts and personal reminiscences. Highlights included: Stern rehearsing in Russian with Music Director Serge Koussevitzky at his 1948 BSO debut; tutoring young violin students during a 1978 visit to China; and a hilarious tale of a Stern concert mishap gleefully told by bandmates cellist Yo-Yo Ma and pianist Emanuel Ax.

Augustin Hadelich

On Friday evening, BSO string section members were magisterial in Bach’s Chaconne (Victor Romanul, violin) and heartwarming in less familiar fare by African-American composers William Grant Still and Florence Price. Saturday’s “Great Performers” concert, recorded audience-free in Studio E, like Friday’s, offered young German violinist Augustin Hadelich and rising American pianist Orion Weiss in riveting accounts of sonatas by Debussy and Brahms and John Adams’s delightful suite “Road Movies.”

In Sunday morning’s audio stream of TMC chamber music concerts, recorded before live audiences in 2015 and 2018, TMC piano fellows played music by six composers, including a sterling Beethoven “Archduke” Piano Trio, a luxuriant Amy Beach piano quintet, and a playful “I prefer living in color” (featuring muted piano strings) by TMC 2018 composition fellow Sarah Gibson.

Sunday afternoon’s video stream brought frequent guest conductor Andre Previn to the podium in a 2007 BSO program that moved from a relaxed Mozart Symphony #29 to an incandescent Haydn first cello concerto, with charismatic German cellist Daniel Muller-Schott, a sultry Ravel “Scheherazade,” with plush-voiced American mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung, and a sumptuous Ravel “Mother Goose” ballet. Host Jamie Bernstein’s father, Leonard Bernstein, led the BSO at Tanglewood in an impassioned 1974 encore of the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s fifth symphony.   

Don’t miss out on these mostly free programs, which will stay online at bso.org for a week after the above dates.

REVIEW: Tanglewood 2020 Online Festival, Week Three

Tanglewood 2020 Online Festival 
www.bso.org
July 13-19, 2020
by Michael J. Moran

The third week of Tanglewood’s virtual 2020 season offered engaging video streams of three educational programs and five concerts as well as a lively concert audio stream.

In its Tuesday “TLI Celebrates Beethoven” series, the Tanglewood Learning Institute presented Dr. Erica Buurman, Director of the Beethoven Center and Editor of its Beethoven Journal at San Jose State University. In a recorded lecture and a Zoom chat with TLI Director Sue Elliott, the Scottish-born musicologist demonstrated Beethoven’s “genuine interest” in the “Viennese popular style” of dance music, even in several of his late string quartets. 

A Wednesday masterclass found mezzo-soprano (and Tanglewood Music Center faculty member) Stephanie Blythe reviewing performances of musical theater songs by four duos of TMC vocal fellows and pianists recorded last summer before a live audience in Studio E of the Linde Center for Music and Learning at Tanglewood. Her deep knowledge of this repertoire and perceptive advice to these talented students was consistently effective and entertaining.

On Thursday’s “TLI ShopTalks” program, Elliott jointly Zoom-interviewed two Boston Symphony members (Cynthia Meyers, piccolo and flute; and Robert Sheena, English horn and oboe), who also answered live-chat audience questions, sharing much candid history about their musical “origin stories,” playing for different conductors and in various concert halls, and daily life at opposite ends of the same row in the orchestra. 

Monday evening’s TMC orchestra concert featured a glowing conductor-less 2018 performance by a mostly standing orchestra of Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings” and a gripping 2016 Brahms first symphony under BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons. At intermission TMC Orchestral Studies Head Ed Gazouleas tells TMC Conducting Head Stefan Asbury how he coached the students in the Tchaikovsky piece.  
  

The Jussens

From Dutch brother pianists Lucas and Arthur Jussen in Wednesday evening’s “Recitals from the World Stage” concert came charisma to spare in piano four-hands music by Mozart, Schubert, and Ravel, recorded two weeks earlier before a masked, widely spaced, but loudly enthusiastic audience in Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw. The program’s showstopper was Polish composer Hanna Kulenty’s mysterious “VAN,” written for the Jussens in 2014.

On Friday evening, BSO violinist Lucia Lin and cellist Owen Young joined other BSO musicians in sensuous accounts of music, recorded audience-free in Studio E last month, by Ravel, Loeffler, and Gabriela Lena Frank. A Saturday “Great Performers” concert in the same venue, also without audience, presented frequent Tanglewood guest violinist Pinchas Zukerman and cellist Amanda Forsyth in stirring performances of Kodaly’s Duo and Beethoven’s curious Duet “with two obbligato eyeglasses.”

Sunday morning’s audio stream of TMC chamber music concerts, recorded before live audiences between 2015 and 2019, featured vocal music by a wide range of composers, from Bach to Britten, and insightful commentary by TMC Vocal Arts Program Head, soprano Dawn Upshaw. Most striking were 2015 TMC commission “Fire and Ice,” Fred Lerdahl’s lush setting of Robert Frost’s poem, and Schoenberg’s transcendent second string quartet, with soprano solo.

In Sunday afternoon’s video stream, beloved BSO Conductor Emeritus Bernard Haitink led the orchestra in a 2013 program that began with German violinist Isabelle Faust in an elegant Mozart fifth violin concerto and ended with a ravishing Mahler fourth symphony. Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling sang dreamily in the last movement. Host Jamie Bernstein endearingly recalled her father, Leonard Bernstein, reading the Mahler score at her childhood family poolside.   

Classical music fans can catch these programs, most of which are free, online at www.bso.org for seven days after these dates. 

PREVIEW: Barrington Stage Company invites “Harry Clarke” to the Berkshires

A sexually charged and wickedly funny one-man thriller, “Harry Clarke,” by acclaimed playwright and solo artist David Cale and starring BSC Associate Artist Mark H. Dold (BSC’s “Breaking the Code,” “Freud’s Last Session”) is the story of a shy midwestern man leading an outrageous double life as the cocky Londoner Harry Clarke. Moving to New York City and presenting himself as an Englishman, he charms his way into a wealthy family’s life as the seductive and precocious Harry, whose increasingly risky and dangerous behavior threatens to undo more than his persona.

In order to offer patrons the safest and most enjoyable experience possible, social distance policies will be in effect through the 2020 season. If planning to attend with a group larger than 2 or 3, call the box office at (413) 236-8888 for accommodation.

“Harry Clarke” begins August 5.
Show time is 7:30pm.
BSC company is located on Union Street, Pittsfield.

For further information check the website at barringtonstageco.org or call 413-236-8888.

REVIEW: Tanglewood 2020 Online Festival, Week Two

Tanglewood Online Festival
www.bso.org
July 6-12, 2020
by Michael J. Moran

For the second week of its virtual 2020 season, Tanglewood offered video streams of one more educational program and two more concerts than in its opening week.

On Tuesday the Tanglewood Learning Institute (TLI) showed Steven Maes’s captivating 54-minute documentary “Inside the Hearing Machine,” in which Belgian pianist Tom Beghin explores Beethoven’s pianos and a special resonator built to straddle his last piano which enabled the deaf composer to “hear” musical vibrations. TLI Director Sue Elliott’s subsequent Zoom chat with Beghin dug deeper into how Beethoven may have “heard” his music as he wrote it.

Paul Lewis

A Wednesday masterclass by English pianist and frequent Tanglewood guest Paul Lewis was recorded before a live audience in Studio E of the Linde Center for Music and Learning at Tanglewood last summer. His unfailingly direct but always encouraging comments as three student pianists at the Tanglewood Music Center (TMC) in turn played Haydn piano sonatas on a keyboard next to his brought out the best in these talented players.

Elliott’s joint Zoom interview on Thursday with Puerto Rican composer Roberto Sierra and African-American jazz saxophone player James Carter explored the musical “fluidity” which led Sierra to write a concerto for saxophones (tenor and baritone) and orchestra for Carter almost twenty years ago and their projections of a more “diverse” future for classical music. 

On Monday evening, enlivening TMC orchestra accounts of music by Wagner and Haydn (both led by Boston Symphony Music Director Andris Nelsons) and Ravel (led by TMC Conducting Program Head Stefan Asbury) were video streamed from concerts recorded in 2018 and 2019. In a 2020 Zoom conversation, Nelsons then tells Asbury how much better he believes the “unique” TMC educational program is than his own European training.
  
Wednesday evening brought Lewis back for the first of three audience-free concerts, this one recorded last month in London’s Wigmore Hall, with a probing rendition of “arguably Beethoven’s greatest piano work,” the Diabelli Variations, and a sensitive Brahms Intermezzo encore.

On Friday evening, BSO Associate Principal Horn Richard Sebring and other BSO musicians, recorded last month in Studio E, presented music by Schumann, Dukas, and Mozart.  Most memorable were two world premier duets by Sebring himself, one for horn and harp (with former TMC fellow Charles Overton), and one for two long alphorns (with BSO third horn Michael Winter), filmed on the Tanglewood lawn.

In a Saturday concert also recorded last month in scenic Studio E, favorite Tanglewood pianist Emanuel Ax played Beethoven’s early second and third piano sonatas and the beloved Bagatelle “Fur Elise” with his customary fervor and polish.

This Sunday morning’s audio stream of TMC chamber music concerts, recorded before live audiences in 2017 and 2018, featured music for woodwinds, brass, and percussion by eight varied composers, including Poulenc, Tomasi, and Hindemith. But the freshest pieces were recent TMC commissions by Scotland’s Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade and TMC composition fellow Theo Chandler.

In Sunday afternoon’s video stream, Nelsons led the BSO in a 2015 program that opened with the French trio of violinist Renaud Capucon, his brother, cellist Gautier Capucon, and pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet in a scintillating Beethoven “Triple” Concerto and closed with a thrilling Shostakovich tenth symphony.  As host Jamie Bernstein astutely notes, camera angles offer unique perspectives on Nelsons’s conducting techniques not easily seen in a concert hall.   


Most of these programs will stay online for seven days after the dates above. Classical music lovers should waste no time in checking them out.

PREVIEW: “Godspell” Takes the Outdoor Stage for Berkshire Theatre Group

www.berkshiretheatregroup.org/event/godspell-2/

Berkshire Theatre Group has not given up on producing quality theatre in the Berkshires this summer. Taking the optimum of safe precautions. “Godspell” will run August 6 – September 4, 2020.

Certainly, “Godspell” has been one of the most well-received musical for decades. However, BTG affords these performances something new. Instead of mounting the musical at the Berkshire Theatre main stage, the new location will be outdoors under a large tent adjacent to the Colonial Theatre, Pittsfield. Colonial is one of the five venues that compose BTF.

In this timeless tale of friendship, loyalty and love, a group of eccentric disciples help Jesus teach a variety of parables through interactive games and a heaping dose of humor. Led by the international hit, "Day by Day," Godspell features a parade of beloved songs by Tony, Academy and Grammy Award-Winner, Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, Pippin, Children of Eden), including: “By My Side” “Save The People” and “All for the Best.”

Brought to life by director Alan Filderman and choreographer Gerry McIntyre this theatrical sensation is a powerful reminder that through the power of community, love and kindness will live on.

Berkshire Theatre Group has not given up on producing quality theatre in the Berkshires this summer. Taking the optimum of safe precautions, “Godspell” will run August 6 – September 4.

Certainly, “Godspell” has been a well-received musical for decades. However, BTG affords these performances something new. Instead of mounting the musical at the Berkshire Theatre main stage, the new location will be outdoors under a large tent adjacent to the Colonial Theatre, Pittsfield. Colonial is one of the five venues that compose BT

In this timeless tale of friendship, loyalty and love, a group of eccentric disciples help Jesus teach a variety of parables through interactive games and a heaping dose of humor. Led by the international hit, "Day by Day," Godspell features a parade of beloved songs by Tony, Academy and Grammy Award-Winner, Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, Pippin, Children of Eden), including: “By My Side” “Save The People” and “All for the Best.”

Brought to life by director Alan Filderman and choreographer Gerry McIntyre this theatrical sensation is a powerful reminder that through the power of community, love and kindness will live on.

PREVIEW: Tanglewood 2020 Online Festival

Tanglewood Online Festival

www.bso.org

July 1 – August 23, 2020

by Michael J. Moran

Classical music fans who were disappointed when the Covid-19 pandemic forced the Boston Symphony Orchestra to cancel the entire 2020 Tanglewood season can now look forward to  a virtual season of comparable digital programming over the next two months.

Concerts will be presented in several different video-streamed series, all featuring artists who were scheduled to perform live at Tanglewood this summer:  on Monday evenings, full-length concerts by the Tanglewood Music Center (TMC) Orchestra, made up of young musicians starting their careers, in Ozawa Hall; on Wednesday evenings, “recitals from the world stage” recorded at concert venues around the world; on Friday evenings, “BSO musicians in recital;” on Saturday evenings, “great performers in recital at Tanglewood;” on Sunday mornings, chamber music concerts by TMC musicians; and on Sunday afternoons, “BSO encore performances” by the orchestra in the Koussevitzky Music Shed.

Sunday and Monday concerts will be chosen from Tanglewood’s extensive archive of recorded performances from previous seasons. Hosts for these series will include: actress Karen Allen; soprano Nicole Cabell; and Jamie Bernstein, “famous father daughter” of Tanglewood favorite son, composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein.

The Tanglewood 2020 Online Festival will also provide access to video and audio streams from the Tanglewood Learning Institute (TLI), which opened its doors in 2019. This newly created and retrospective programming will include Wednesday afternoon master classes with TMC fellows, Boston University Tanglewood Institute (high-school-age) students, and Tanglewood Festival Chorus singers taught by: BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons; pianist Paul Lewis; violinist Midori; mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe; and cellist Yo-Yo Ma. 

Additional TLI offerings will include: TLI Open Forum, exploring the roaring twenties and the romantic spirit (Monday afternoons); TLI Celebrates Beethoven, an in-depth exploration of the composer’s work during his 250th anniversary year (Tuesday afternoons); and TLI Shop Talks, engaging conversations with notable artists of our time (Thursday afternoons).

Most programming will remain accessible online for seven days after its scheduled date, and while many events are free, the cost of others starts at as little as $5.00.

The festival schedule can be found HERE

ITS plans to post a weekly series of reviews and commentaries on the Tanglewood 2020 Online Festival throughout the season.

REVIEW: Tanglewood 2020 Online Festival, Week One

July 1-5, 2020
www.bso.org
by Michael J. Moran

Though forced online this year by the Covid-19 pandemic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra launched the 2020 Tanglewood festival with a rich video and audio stream of musical offerings in its opening week.

The first two events were presented by the Tanglewood Learning Institute (TLI), housed in the newly built Linde Center for Music and Learning, which opened its doors for year-round programming in 2019. BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons led a Wednesday masterclass recorded last summer with Tanglewood Music Center (TMC) conducting fellows Nathan Aspinall and Cillian Farrell, both early-stage professionals. 

It was fascinating to watch Nelsons coach them before a live audience in the Linde Center’s picturesque Studio E as they led a mini-orchestra through portions of Brahms’s second symphony, and to learn about Nelsons’s own teachers in a Zoom interview with BSO Artistic Director Anthony Fogg.

On Thursday TLI Director Sue Elliott spoke via Zoom with the two newest members of the Juilliard String Quartet, Greek-born violinist Areta Zhulla and African-American cellist (and TMC faculty member) Astrid Schween, who both shared insightful reflections on life in a world-class ensemble and the post-pandemic classical music scene.

In the first of two audience-free Friday evening concerts recorded last month in Studio E, BSO Principal Flute Elizabeth Ostling joined pianist Randall Hodgkinson in an affecting account of Copland’s Duet for Flute and Piano and dazzled in James Lee III’s 2011 “Lament without Sadness” for solo flute. Associate Concertmaster Alexander Velinzon then led an ensemble of BSO strings and pianist Jonathan Bass in a vibrant rendition of Brahms’s Piano Quintet. 

Gil Shaham

The second concert showcased riveting violinist Gil Shaham in a varied program of solo violin works, including Bach’s third sonata, Prokofiev’s only such sonata, and appropriate contemporary pieces like Max Raimi’s amusing “Anger Management” and Scott Wheeler’s delightful “Isolation Rag,” written for Shaham during the Covid-19 quarantine. 

A Sunday morning audio stream of TMC string players recorded before live audiences in Ozawa Hall presented highlights of the 2016-2019 “string quartet seminars” which open every summer. For young musicians who had played together for barely a week, these performances of quartets by Haydn and Mendelssohn and quartet movements by composers from Beethoven to Berg showed impressive technical and stylistic mastery.

Sunday afternoon featured a video stream of guest conductor Jacques Lacombe leading the BSO in a 2015 Independence Day program of American music. Kirill Gerstein was the compelling soloist in Gershwin’s Piano Concerto, and John Douglas Thompson a stirring narrator in Copland’s “A Lincoln Portrait.” 

Most of these programs will stay online for seven days after the dates above. Classical music lovers are urged to explore them.