After Night Flight Charles and I watched the PBS Summer Arts Festival broadcast of the 75th anniversary concert at Tanglewood, the Massachusetts retreat which in 1937 was owned by Mary Aspinwall Tappan, who made her property available to the Boston Symphony Orchestra for summer concerts after their first venue in the Berkshires had been angrily denounced by conductor Serge Koussevitsky because the orchestra had to perform under a tent, which Koussevitsky felt was too dangerous for both the musicians and the audience. So in 1937 Ms. Tappan agreed not only to let her estate be used for summer concerts but to build a shed in which the orchestra could play, which stood (with renovations in 1959) until the 1990’s, when Sony Corporation decided to underwrite a new hall and, rather than insist that it be named “Sony Hall,” proclaimed that it should bear the name of Seiji Ozawa, the Japanese-born conductor who had been the principal conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for nearly 30 years, longer than anyone else. Tanglewood was at least as important for its role as a summer camp for aspiring young musicians than for the professional concerts held there; in 1940 Aaron Copland was hired to be the composition teacher and one of his students was a young Bostonian of Russian-Jewish heritage named Leonard Bernstein. (There are persistent rumors that in addition to teaching Bernstein, Copland also seduced him that summer and gave him his first Gay sexual experience.)
I had thought
from the description of this show on the PBS Web site that it would be a
documentary about Tanglewood, but instead it was a concert video with a few
documentary segments (apparently shown to the live audience at the concert as
well as being incorporated into this TV show) stuck in. The program featured
three of the orchestras that usually perform at Tanglewood — the Boston
Symphony, the Boston “Pops” and the Tanglewood Youth Festival Orchestra — and
no fewer than six conductors. It opened with Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common
Man” (what else?) and three “dance episodes” from Leonard Bernstein’s 1944
musical On the Town (itself based on an
earlier ballet of his called Fancy Free,
about three sailors on a one-day leave in New York City — the musical was filmed
by MGM in 1949 but Bernstein was upset because MGM dumped all but four of his
songs and had Roger Edens write new ones they thought would be more
audience-accessible, and the film’s star, Frank Sinatra, was upset when the
studio cut his big ballad feature, “Lonely Town,” from the final cut — “Lonely
Town” was heard here as the middle “dance” with a trumpeter taking the vocal
line) conducted by the Boston “Pops”’ regular conductor these days, Keith
Lockhart. (He’s put on the pounds and the years have not been all that kind, but he’s still a nice-looking man; when I first saw
him conduct on a PBS telecast I joked that he’d be trying to pick up someone in
a bar in Boston and when the inevitable what-do-you-do-for-a-living? question
came up he’d say, “I conduct the Boston ‘Pops’ Orchestra,” and the person he
was talking to would say, “Get outta here — the Boston ‘Pops’ is only conducted
by white-haired old guys with moustaches or beards!”)
Then the last
white-haired old guy with facial hair who’d conducted the Boston “Pops,”
Academy Award-winning film composer John Williams, came out and led what was
billed as a medley of standards from the Great American Songbook, arranged by
someone named Goldstein and featuring the well-known golden throat of … James Taylor.
(I guess Tony Bennett was busy that week.) Today James Taylor is an old man
with virtually no hair, both by nature and by choice — that full head of hair
from the Sweet Baby James album cover
half the straight women and Gay men in America fell in love with in the early
1970’s is history, and his voice is as bland and dull as ever as he plowed his
way through Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow” (the bright-eyed wonder of the
young Judy Garland, the hard-bitten world-weariness of the older one and the righteous
gospel-soul of Ray Charles were sorely missed in this song), Richard Rodgers’
“Shall We Dance?” (which he did decently but blandly, hardly on a level with
Gertrude Lawrence or Deborah Kerr’s all-purpose voice double, Marni Nixon) and
Jerome Kern’s “Ol’ Man River” (for which he picked up his guitar and seemed a bit more comfortable even though he mangled the words — either
that or he was singing an alternate version with some pointless changes from
the lyric Oscar Hammerstein II wrote), but aside from the fact that Taylor is a
Massachusetts native I can’t think of any earthly reason why he should have
been on this show when there are plenty of other singers, including such
better-known names (at least today) as Norah Jones or Esperanza Spalding, who could
have done these songs worlds better.
Fortunately things got better after that
when pianist Emanuel Ax came on with conductor Stefan Asbury and the Tanglewood
Youth Festival Orchestra to play the last two movements of Haydn’s Piano
Concerto in D (it was probably a harpsichord concerto originally, but who
cares?) and play them beautifully, following which Yo-Yo Ma (whom I saw with Emanuel Ax in a concert in La Jolla in the 1980’s; they
played beautifully but their program was Russian schlock and I’d much rather have heard them play Bach and
Beethoven!) came out and conducted the youth orchestra while playing the cello
solo in Tchaikovsky’s “Andante cantabile.” That was really the high point of the show; while the acclaim
Ma has got has led people to forget that there are other living classical cellists, he played divinely and
got the Tanglewood youth orchestra to sound fully professional (there was a
brief clip, before the piece started, of him rehearsing them). Afterwards we
heard the Boston Symphony under conductor Andris Nelsons (Charles joked that
he’d never seen his last name with an “s” on the end of it before, but the man
is Latvian and maybe that explains it) and violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter playing
Sarasate’s fantasy on themes from Bizet’s Carmen. We’d just heard the San Diego Concert Band playing another fantasy on Carmen
— and actually a more creatively selected one than this because it dug deeper
into the opera and included some of its less familiar bits as well as the Big
Hits — but this one was created by a virtuoso violinist to be a showpiece for
himself, and it worked vividly for Mutter in that regard. Nelsons also
conducted the next piece, Ravel’s La Valse, in a surprisingly slow and restrained manner that worked
well in the opening sections (all sorts of slithery things seemed to be
emerging from the orchestra pit) but seemed too dull for the final parts, which
are supposed to represent the terminal decadence of the Viennese waltz
tradition. (Remember that Ravel wrote the piece during World War I, in which
Austria and France were on opposite sides.)
The concert’s finale was
Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, Op. 80, a piece which lingers on the edge of the
repertory only because Beethoven wrote it but still is pretty much a stepchild
among his works — I can’t remember ever
having heard it before and it’s only rarely been recorded: most of the
recordings listed on arkivmusic.com seem to be fillers for sets of the
Beethoven piano concerti and during the LP era Zubin Mehta recorded it as a
fourth-side filler for his record of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (well, he had the chorus there already … ), but when the Mehta Ninth was
reissued on CD (the form in which I have it) there wasn’t room on the disc for
the Choral Fantasy and so it was dropped. Still, it’s middle-period Beethoven
(that opus number puts it between the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies) and it’s an
interesting piece, especially for its structure: it opens with a long
introduction for the piano soloist (here, Peter Serkin) alone, following which
a few orchestral instruments trickle in until the full orchestra is playing,
and then and only then does the chorus
make its entrance. I had already been feeling for those poor choristers, who
instead of being able to wait backstage (or elsewhere) and only being brought
on when the piece they were going to participate in was played, had during this
concert to sit on stage all night for an hour and 45 minutes until they finally got to sing. (Charles said it reminded him of a stratagem
the Metropolitan Community Church in Sacramento used to get people to join
their choir: they advertised, “Best Seats in the House on Easter!”) The piece
is an interesting one, almost a beta version of the finale of the Ninth
Symphony: not only does it mix orchestra, vocal soloists and chorus, but the
text is one of ecstasy and joy — but it needs a better account than it got
here: David Zinman was the conductor, and he plodded through it with no sense
of ecstasy or joy, more like duty. I’d
heard Zinman described as a dull conductor in the pages of the American
Record Guide (also Fanfare had some not-so-nice things to say about his recordings,
though they were hardly as relentless about it as the ARG’s critics were) but I hardly thought I’d hear so total a
confirmation of it as I did in this performance! Overall, the Tanglewood
concert was a good one; I’d have enjoyed it if I’d been in the audience (except
when James Taylor was singing — all you need to know about Taylor can be summed
up if you play his bland, boring version of his own song “Carolina in My Mind”
and then listen to the intense, soulful cover Melanie recorded) but at the same
time I’d have wished for more “oomph” in the two big works that closed the
program. All too often I’ve heard recent recordings of classics that seemed to
plod through the score instead of using
it to communicate emotion, and there’s more than one piece for which I feel I
need a recent recording to tell me how the music is supposed to sound and an historic one to tell me what it’s supposed to be about!
