Lenox — The Boston Symphony Orchestra will present an all-Beethoven program on Tanglewood’s opening night, Friday, July 5, with Gil Shaham performing Beethoven’s only violin concerto and Andris Nelsons leading the orchestra in the composer’s pathbreaking Symphony No. 3, “Eroica.” And on the same day, at 2:30 p.m., in the air-conditioned Lenox Town Hall, Boston University Professor of Music Jeremy Yudkin will share some little-known details about these pieces, details that will amaze you, amuse you, and markedly enhance your listening experience.
Jeremy Yudkin is an internationally recognized authority on Beethoven’s life and music who, along with Lewis Lockwood, founded Boston University’s Center for Beethoven Research.
In addition to Boston University, where he has been nominated six times for the school’s highest teaching award, Dr. Yudkin has taught as visiting professor of music at Oxford and Harvard Universities and Professeur Invité at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris, France.
He is the author of eight books and has published articles in such journals as the American Musicological Society, Musica Disciplina, Speculum, Notes, The Musical Quarterly, Early Music, American Music, and Music and Letters, as well as The Salisbury Review, Berkshire Living, The Stanford Italian Review, and The American Journal of Philology.
As an author, Jeremy is probably best known for his textbooks “Music in Medieval Europe” and “Understanding Music,” a music appreciation textbook that is used by over 20,000 students across North America every year. But he also writes about jazz: “The Lenox School of Jazz: A Vital Chapter in the History of American Music and Race Relations” (2006); and “Miles Davis, Miles Smiles, and the Invention of Post-Bop” (2009), which won an Award for Excellence in Historical Sound Research from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections.
Organized by the Lenox Library, Jeremy’s Tanglewood pre-concert talks are now in their 42nd consecutive year. They are held in the Town Hall auditorium, located at 6 Walker Street, from 2:30 to 4 p.m. on Friday afternoons, and Sunday mornings from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Hear Boston University Professor Jeremy Yudkin talk about Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and “Eroica” Symphony on Friday, 2:30 p.m., at Lenox Town Hall. Admission is free, thanks to the generosity of the Lenox Library Association and Margery and Lewis Steinberg.
