At last, a major institution in America is standing up to the bullying and extortion that seems to characterize every action of the Trump administration.
Here was a different kind of Tanglewood orchestral concert. Notwithstanding the size of the ensemble, it had the intimacy of a string quartet. The players appeared deeply to engage as individuals.
The 24 songs comprising Franz Schubert’s 'Winterreise' (Winter Journey) were sung with penetrating intelligence by bass-baritone Matthais Goerne. This masterpiece of Viennese lieder was written as Schubert wasted away from a chronically debilitating illness.
Did this Terfel walk the walk and kvetch the kvetch of Tevye in “If I were a Rich Man,” from “Fiddler on the Roof?” Did he ever, to end the concert, to clamorous applause. “From Wotan to Tevye!” one audience member exclaimed afterward.
You can imagine how the great Schubert C Major Quintet dominated the evening, especially with such a polished and musically sensitive performance as I have come to expect from the Chicago-based Avalon Quartet, which was joined by Yehuda Hanani as second cello, to fill out the Schubert Quintet.
The real sensation of the afternoon was the young violinist Benjamin Beilman, whose sound has all the natural projection and power of a premier concert-soloist. In fact, I would have been happy to have seen Mr. Beilman replace most any of the underwhelming cohort of violin soloists this year at Tanglewood.
One questions what the use is of “doing our due” to the obscure repertoire of the avant-garde when it often seems we have only tangentially begun to probe the works of the eternal genius Haydn.
