Lenox — Tanglewood’s annual Festival of Contemporary Music (FCM) is not a crowd pleaser. It is an aficionado pleaser. The festival exists not to entertain crowds but to serve connoisseurs of modern orchestral concert music. And it has performed that service faithfully every summer since 1964. Nevertheless, crowds get pleased all the time at FCM concerts, and that is exactly what happened in Ozawa Hall on July 31 in the festival’s closing program, when the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra performed works by festival curators Reena Esmail, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Tebogo Monnakgotla, and Gabriela Lena Frank.
Add this to your bucket list: Enjoy a performance of Reena Esmail’s “RE|Member” in the Koussevitzky Music Shed. No, it’s not on the Tanglewood calendar, but just wait awhile, because Esmail’s piece is immediately engaging to a first-time listener while depriving the hard-core, new-music enthusiast of nothing in the way of fresh colors or thrilling dissonances. Exotic new textures and modes flow in a steady stream of orchestral ear candy throughout this eight-minute piece, which offers harmonies of sufficient tonal ambiguity to keep listeners on their toes combined with enough tonal familiarity to keep them connected. (This also tends to be true of the program’s other pieces.) But its most engaging moments come when Esmail juxtaposes Western and classical Indian melodic modes as she sends the strings sliding in and out of notes in the manner of The Beatles’ “Within You Without You.” Esmail skillfully commingles these disparate sound worlds to produce wonderfully pleasing harmonies, dissonances, and deeply affective melodic lines. A critic for the San Mateo Daily Journal wrote (of a different Esmail piece), “This theme is so catchy that I heard someone whistling it during intermission. When’s the last time that happened at a modern music concert?” (For the record, the last time it happened at an FCM concert was on July 31, 2023.)
Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Metacosmos” (2017), is, in her telling, about the through line from chaos to beauty—”how elements can come together in (seemingly) utter chaos to create a unified, structured whole.” This gripping piece is about 15 minutes long, and if you listen to it one time through at the above link, you may be forever haunted by it. Anna grew up on the west coast of Iceland, and her music is easy to associate with images of inexorable natural forces. Agata ZajÄ…c conducted, and the TMC orchestra seized the day.
Singers with exquisite control and beautiful tone, baritones Rolfe Dauz and Kevin Douglass Jasaitis performed Tebogo Monnakgotla’s “Un Clin d’oel,” for baritone and orchestra (2018), bringing to life the French-language texts of Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo with captivating and emotionally resonant performances of each movement. Armand Singh Birk conducted.
Stefan Asbury conducted the program’s closing work, Gabriela Lena Frank’s “Walkabout: Concerto for Orchestra,” a 30-minute piece inspired by the composer’s travels in Peru. Frank’s distinctive musical language, blending Western classical techniques with Peruvian-Chinese-Jewish influences, is fully up to the task of conveying the atmosphere of the Andes and other Peruvian landscapes. “Walkabout” is one of Frank’s most popular works.
The Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra’s playing on July 31 was flawless.
