Had composer and conductor Oliver Knussen not died in Suffolk last year at the age of 66, he would have presided over this year’s Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music. It seemed fitting as well that the first sounds to put the new hall to test were Knussen’s stunning 'Prequel to Opening Signal.'
Most impressive was how conductor Andris Nelsons held the orchestra still long after it at had ceased playing for what the audience perceived as an odd, even uncomfortable, period — silence is a sound, too.
The Boston University Tanglewood Institute is an eight-week program of the college to train musicians of middle and high school age by immersing them in the world of professional and deeply exciting music-making.
“I have survived by hiding -- in the woods and on the street... How do I walk a path to honor [the gifts I’ve been given]? I don’t know where to fit in.”
-- Itinerant artist and songwriter Dorrie, during an interview at Construct Inc. in Great Barrington, Massachusetts
For decades a Stockbridge police officer stood that corner assuring the safety. Now, drivers navigate without assistance. Some say it is too dangerous for a policeman to stand that post.
“We feel it our duty to hand down the old treasures of Musical Culture to American Youth. Enriched by this culture, the Young People of America will carry it further to new achievement.”
-- Serge Koussevitsky, upon the opening of Tanglewood Music Center in 1940
“Throughout my life I have envisioned the establishment of a great music and art center in the world. The United States of America can and are destined to have such a center. American freedom is the best soil for it.”
-- Serge Koussevitzky
"The combined institution creates in one stroke the most comprehensive training ground for performing arts and related careers in the country, if not the world."
-- Boston Conservatory president Richard Ortner, describing the proposed merger of the Berklee College of Music and the Boston Conservatory
Larkin has appeared on and off Broadway with the Royal National Theater and the Royal Shakespeare Company. As a stand-up comic she was a regular headliner at the Comic Strip in New York and the Comedy Store in Los Angeles and spent three years under studio contract to star in her own sitcom with CBS, ABC and Jim Henson Productions.
This was an auspicious start of the Tanglewood season, signaling, one may hope, the advent of a special musical welcoming and inclusiveness by Maestro Nelsons and his company.
The campaign to rid the Shed of starlings began in the 1940s with birdshot. Chemicals were tried in the ‘50s, and screening in the ‘60s. All to no avail.
