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Symphonies, Suites and Götterdämmerung: A Weekend at Tanglewood

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by Peter Matthews

"It's not the lawn, it's not the great old pines. It's not the blue skies, or sudden thunderstorms, or the mountains. All that is wonderful...But, it's the spirit of Sergei Alexandrovich Koussevitzky that makes that place magic." - Leonard Bernstein, 1985 

Part of the pleasure of returning to the Berkshires each summer is the comfort in knowing that as much as the world might seem a constant shitstream of chaos, this place will always stay the same. (Well, mostly the same.) The rolling hills, the lakes, the charming villages and cultural amenities: this place gets in your blood.

But for me, there's always been one real reason to make the three hour drive up the Taconic over the past three decades: Tanglewood, the annual music festival which has filled this sylvan paradise with some of the world's best music since 1937. Much more than just a classical music festival, Tanglewood has always thrived on its dual identity as both the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and one of the world's leading training grounds for young musicians. (It's now also a place of learning for non-musicians of all ages.)

Unfortunately, Tanglewood has seen more than its share of turmoil over the past few summers, with the retirement of longtime BSO CEO Mark Volpe and TMC Director Ellen Highstein followed by the short-lived tenures of Gail Samuel (CEO) and Asadour Santourian (TMC), not to mention the cancellation of the entire 2020 and much of 2021 seasons due to COVID. But, with the hires this season of Chad Smith  (CEO) from the LA Phil and Ed Gazouleas as TMC Director, Tanglewood seems to be back on its right footing, with ambitious plans to expand its offerings over the next few seasons, including renovating the old Theatre-Concert Hall for staged opera productions and opening the Linde Center for Music and Learning for year-round programming. 

But, for all the recent disruption, most things at Tanglewood remain the same. The Shed looks just as it did when it was built in 1938, the round tables out back of Highwood are placed exactly where they've always been, the rehearsal shacks still echo with the sound of young musicians running through solos. Also still in place is Tony Fogg, the BSO's VP of Artistic Planning and de facto Tanglewood director for the past three decades, responsible for keeping all of the ships moving in the same direction.

And of course, there is Music Director Andris Nelsons, now in his tenth season with the orchestra. For all his globetrotting - Nelsons is also the Kapellmeister of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, Germany and a regular guest conductor in Vienna and Berlin - he has been a solid presence at Tanglewood each summer, conducting no less than four weeks of concerts with both the BSO and TMC while personally teaching the conducting fellows. (Nelsons was officially named Tanglewood's Head of Conducting in January at the same time he was awarded an "evergreen" contract, which basically means he can stay in Boston as long as he likes, perhaps even longer than Seiji.)

Boston Symphony Orchestra, Shed, Tanglewood, 7/19/24It wasn't Nelsons on the podium when I arrived on a gorgeous Friday night (7/19), but Finnish conductor Dima Slobodeniouk, who has himself become a regular presence at Tanglewood over the past few summers. The program opened with a relative rarity: Bernstein's Symphony No. 2, "The Age of Anxiety" inspired by W.H. Auden's poem of the same name about a group of disaffected youngsters in 1940's NYC who go out to a bar, get drunk, then end up at a young woman's apartment for a nightcap, where their ennui gives way to existential dread. (Sounds like a regular Tuesday in New York.) Bernstein, who both began and ended his musical career at Tanglewood, wrote it for the BSO in 1948 (he revised the ending in 1965) and dedicated it to its then-music director Serge Koussevitzky, Tanglewood's founder and leading light, whom the BSO is celebrating this summer on the 150th anniversary of his birth

More of an extended piano concerto than symphony, The Age of Anxiety unfolds over 40 minutes with sections titled "The Seven Ages", "The Dirge" and "The Masque." At turns jazzy, introspective, disturbing and ebullient, the music makes unusual demands on its soloist, ideally someone equally at home in both classical and ragtime. Fortunately, the BSO had on hand the brilliant, genre-defying pianist-composer Conrad Tao, who provided the perfect blend of pathos, humor and virtuosity, despite the fact that he hadn't performed the work in five years. After the final radiant chords floated through the Shed, Conrad played his own transcription of Art Tatum's finger-flying 1953 recording of "Over the Rainbow." (Boston audiences will be able to see more of Conrad next season, when he appears with frequent collaborator Caleb Teicher in a program fusing tap dance and piano.)  Dima Slobodeniouk and Conrad Tao, Tanglewood, 7/19/24After the intermission, Slobodeniouk returned with a performance of Brahms 3 that was perfectly...fine? But, also rigid, formal, and a weird thing to put next to Bernstein. (Lenny, who often conducted Brahms himself at Tanglewood, would no doubt agree.) Still, I have to admit that Slobodeniouk's expansive tempos in the first three movements paid off in the finale, which sounded majestic and overwhelming from my Very close seats in Section 1; the octogenarian Brahmins around me ate it up. 

Tanglewood, 7/20/24Clouds rolled in on Saturday night but no one seemed to care, as the real "twilight" was in the Shed: namely, Act 3 of Wagner's Götterdämmerung ("Twilight of the Gods"), with Nelsons conducting the BSO and a starry cast of (mostly) American singers. Tanglewood has performed quite a bit of Wagner over the past two decades, both with the BSO (2013: Die Walküre (Act 3); 2017: Das Rheingold) and the fellows of the TMC Orchestra (2005: Die Walküre (Act 1) and Gotterdammerung (Act 3); 2009: Die Meistersinger (Act 3); 2019: Die Walküre, complete). As has Nelsons, who was once in the rotation of regular conductors at Bayreuth before he fell out in 2016 (he returned in 2022), prompting one writer to dub Tanglewood, "Bayreuth-in-the-Berkshires."

“For me," Nelsons said in an interview with radio station WCRB, "Wagner’s music is symbolic about the world we’re living in. He is predicting how the world can take certain turns if we fall victim to our base instincts: greed, power, etc. It is a warning sign: look what happens if you have the wrong purposes in your life. But, there is hope in the music, especially the finale. It’s very strange: for such a terrible person as Wagner was, his music touches the sky." 

7.20.24 The BSO and cast of Götterdämmerung take bows at Tanglewood (Hilary Scott)
The BSO and cast of Götterdämmerung Photo: Hilary Scott

This was the first Tanglewood performance of Götterdämmerung since 2005, when former BSO and Met Opera music director James Levine performed it with the TMC Orchestra on a ridiculously ambitious - and long - program that also included Act 1 from Die Walküre. (I was there.) As impressive as that performance was - Levine reportedly spent some 30 hours in rehearsal with them - this is demanding music that cries for the chops of a professional orchestra, with its Wagner tubas, naked trumpet solos, and no fewer than six harps.

The cast for this concert performance may not have been starry as those when Levine was in charge, but the performances were uniformly strong. Swedish tenor Michael Weinius was a solid Siegfried, having recently sung the role at the Vienna State Opera, though he was was strangely on book here. Amanda Majeski was a sympathetic Gutrune; James Rutherford was appropriately doltish as her brother, Gunther. Perhaps most impressive was bass David Leigh in the crucial role of Hagen, a recent grad of the Met's Lindemann program who was a late replacement for veteran Morris Robinson. Leigh sang with delicious malevolence, his menacing voice sending shivers.

7.20.24 Christine Goerke as Brünnhilde in Act III of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung at Tanglewood (2) (Hilary Scott)
Christine Goerke and Andris Nelsons with the Boston Symphony Orchestra Photo: Hilary Scott

There was one name that stood out: soprano Christine Goerke in the pivotal role of Brünnhilde, arriving at the end of the opera to deliver her fearsome diatribe against the stupidity of humanity and the vainglory of the gods ("Immolation Scene"). Goerke, this country's leading Brünnhilde who also sang the role in Tanglewood's 2019 Die Walküre, was a force of nature: her booming, majestic voice carrying easily over the massive orchestra, injecting her performance with raw, terrifying emotion.

But the real star of the show was the BSO, which delivered a performance under Nelsons that was worthy of any opera orchestra: tight, burnished, with plenty of dramatic heft. "Siegfried's Funeral Music and Rhine Journey" pulsed with darkness, yielding to an enormous crescendo that penetrated the back rows of the Shed to the lawn beyond. And, in the opera's final orchestral sequence, where the flames of Brünnhilde's pyre destroy Valhalla and the Rhine overflows its banks, the BSO played with radiance and transporting beauty, the audience allowing the final chord to slowly die away into the Berkshires night before erupting in applause - a welcome change from my experiences at the Met, where the audience often drowns out the last few bars. Michael Weinius, Christine Goerke, Andris Nelsons

After such an epic performance, the BSO could hardly be faulted for not wanting to get out of bed the next day, so the Shed was turned over to the TMC Orchestra for the annual Leonard Bernstein Memorial concert. For those not in the know, the TMC Orchestra is made up of recent conservatory grads, all in their early 20's, most of whom have never played together. Not to mention most of the music on their stands they're seeing for the first time. 

While the BSO may have had the day off, there was no rest for Nelsons, who no doubt spent more hours than usual rehearsing this challenging program, beginning with Ives' sometimes haunting, sometimes raucous Three Places in New England. I smiled while the fellows played the tender, vaguely unsettling "The Housatonic at Stockbridge," which I'd witnessed just that morning flowing past the Norman Rockwell Museum a few miles south. 

7.21.24 Emanuel Ax plays Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3 with Andris Nelsons and the BSO (1) (Hilary Scott)
Emanuel Ax and Andris Nelsons (Photo: Hilary Scott)

Emanuel Ax, who's been performing at Tanglewood for nearly five decades and has a home in the area, ambled out next to play Beethoven's third piano concerto, climbing gingerly across the podium to his piano bench. But, while Manny may not be as spry as he used to be, his fingers still fly with all the dexterity they ever have, playing this early masterpiece with fluidity and grace; the same was true of his encore, Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp minor.

I sat in the back of the Shed for Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra, familiar to most audiences  from Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nearly 130 years old now, the opening sequence remains the most startling in orchestral music (with the possible exception of Beethoven's 5th): epic, monumental, triumphant. For the next half-hour, the music meandered through a musical depiction of the evolution of man, which the fellows played with confidence, right through to the faint tolling of the winds at the end. 

As I pulled out on West Street on our way back to Lee and the Mass Pike, I was filled with the usual admixture of emotions at the end of a Tanglewood weekend: elation over the music, restoration from the wide mountain views, wistfulness thinking about friends who used to join me in the Shed, solace knowing that no matter what else changes, Tanglewood will stay the same, more or less. And it'll still be there for a few more weeks, and next summer, and hopefully, all summers.

Shed, Tanglewood, 7/21/24
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