Lenox — Something highly unusual occurred on Sunday, July 28, at Tanglewood, something that will be talked about for a long, long time. Andris Nelsons led the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in Acts 2 and 3 of Richard Wagner’s “Die Walküre” (They started with Act I the night before). This, in itself, is unusual, because no one has ever performed the piece in its entirety either at Tanglewood or Symphony Hall. But things really turned odd when Nelsons lifted his baton to begin Act 2: Bang! Thunder echoed through the Tanglewood grounds like gods signaling Wotan’s imminent arrival. The crowd chuckled and applauded. Nelsons — always the good sport — froze, his baton suspended in mid-air, until quiet returned.
Of course, everyone who attended Jeremy Yudkin‘s pre-concert lecture that morning knew that Wotan’s arrival — in the person of bass-baritone James Rutherford — actually was imminent, and once the henpecked deity had arrived on stage, local thunder continued to punctuate his words. Fresh outbursts of wind, lightning and rain seemed part of the show, cued by Wagner himself.
The whole scene was altogether odd, and everyone was delighted that such an improbably timed twist of meteorological fate would occur on the one day that Wotan would visit the Tanglewood grounds in person. Meanwhile, in plain view on the Shed stage, along with myriad other percussion instruments, stood an object — just a thin sheet of metal suspended in a frame — that sounds like thunder when you give it a good whack as instructed in the score. (So you see, Wagner’s score actually does provide cues for weather effects.)
The most excited concert talk in the coming days, however, will focus on the individual soloists who portrayed the story’s main characters on Saturday and Sunday. You are likely to hear it said that all the soloists — but especially Amber Wagner (soprano), Franz-Josef Selig (bass), Christine Goerke (soprano), and the Great and Powerful Stephanie Blythe (mezzo-soprano) — delivered staggeringly brilliant performances of consummate beauty and extraordinary technical excellence. Descriptions of these performances are bound to go over the top, even rising at times to the level of seemingly irrational exuberance. But music critics hate to sound like giddy children, so there will likely be two types of reviews: ones that gush over the principal divas unabashedly and ones that gush over the principal divas in a more reserved and respectable fashion. Gushing is gushing.
