Lenox – The “Tanglewood on Parade” special events on August 2nd included the ever-popular Tent Club Instrument Playground, where volunteer musicians demonstrated their instruments for children and their parents. It was a busy scene of joyful noise: Horns blasted, drums pounded, bells rang, trombones and trumpets sounded their brassy timbres, and string instruments produced tones that were barely audible over the din of the playground’s pleasantly chaotic cacophony.
Watch for these aspiring young musicians in the future. Many of them took the exercise quite seriously. Remember their names, because some of these kids are bound to appear on the Shed stage in just a few decades.
Tanglewood on Parade: The musical spectacle
In customary fashion, the myriad music-making events of this year’s Tanglewood on Parade came to a perfectly raucous, kid-friendly conclusion on the evening of Tuesday, August 2nd with deafening cannon fire and aerial pyrotechnics. Blowing stuff up is such a natural thing to do after a bombastic spectacle like Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” — the ending piece on Tuesday evening’s gala concert program — that it’s become a tradition to detonate fireworks at the close of each summer’s Tanglewood on Parade.
This year, however, a fair amount of tumultuous noise came early in the evening, when the Shed audience shouted out its approval of the program’s opening piece, Michael Gandolfi’s “Night Train to Perugia.” Commissioned for the Tanglewood Music Festival’s 75th anniversary, Gandolfi’s neutrino-inspired thrill ride of a piece contains everything necessary to engage first-time listeners and more than enough ear candy — including a generous helping of old-fashioned counterpoint — to reward any number of repeated hearings. (Also, it offers physics geeks a completely new way of thinking about subatomic particles.)
Tuesday’s audience enjoyed a treat they can never get enough of: “Guest” solo performances by regular members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. So, when Elizabeth Rowe, principal flute, and Jessica Zhou, harp, stepped onto the Shed stage Tuesday evening (August 2) appropriately clad in colorful soloist attire, they received a hero’s welcome from several thousand fans who regularly hear these musicians perform — practically incognito — as rank-and-file members of the orchestra.
Neither Rowe nor Zhou are flamboyant performers. Instead, their stock in trade is inconspicuous perfection constant as the northern star. Thus, their performance of Mozart’s popular Concerto in C for Flute and Harp, K.299, was at once modest and profoundly revelatory because of the way it kept the spotlight focused solely on Mozart’s musical intentions. The result was perfectly untainted beauty.
It’s difficult to imagine how a performance of Maurice Ravel’s “La Valse” could be more spectacular than the one Stéphane Denève and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra delivered on Tuesday evening. No doubt other ensembles have approached the white-hot intensity of Tuesday’s performance, but Denève has a special touch with this piece, and, combined with the orchestra’s characteristic precision and vigor, it made for a breathtaking listening experience. Unforgettable.
Tanglewood audiences have always greeted John Williams with extravagant expressions of affection. But when the Conductor Laureate of the Boston Pops Orchestra first appeared on the Shed stage Tuesday evening, his fans expressed not only their affection for him but also their relief to see living proof of his recovery from the back injury that forced him to cancel his 2015 Tanglewood appearances. It was a joyful moment for all of Williams’ Tanglewood friends.
Once on the podium, Williams conducted the Boston Pops Orchestra in “Of Grace and Majesty,” the world premier of “The BFG” (a suite from his score for Steven Spielberg’s film of the same name), and “March of the Resistance” from “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”
John Williams tends to be subdued and relaxed on the podium, but on Tuesday night, he was on his toes, animated, with vigor to spare. But of course; he’s only in his eighties.
Anyone can see that the Shed stage can accommodate exactly one symphony orchestra. Yet every summer, to conclude the last concert of Tanglewood on Parade, two entire orchestras perform the preposterous feat of packing themselves onto the Shed stage and — without bumping elbows — playing Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.”
Watching all members of the Boston Symphony and Tanglewood Music Center Orchestras shoehorn themselves into their positions onstage is akin to seeing Joey Chestnut consume 66 hot dogs (with buns): You blink in disbelief even as the impossible plays out in front of you. It can’t be happening, but it is.
“Oh my God! They’re really doing it!” a girl exclaims nearby.
And then . . . there they are, 200-plus musicians waiting for the downbeat.
Witnessing this absurdly cornucopic display is worth the price of admission. But then comes the immense wall of cataclysmic sound, the collisions of uncommonly large cymbals, the melodramatic flourishes and crescendos, the thunder and lightning of real cannons . . .
It’s enough to inspire a kid to someday join this very ensemble. And, every year, some of them do.
