Lenox — Yo-Yo Ma, Midori, and the music of John Williams will make for a grand weekend at Tanglewood August 16 through 18. Continuing the summer’s Russian theme on Friday, Midori will vanquish Prokofiev’s devilishly difficult Violin Concerto No. 1, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra will perform Yevgeny Svetlanov’s “Dawn in the Field.” On Saturday, Keith Lockhart will lead the Boston Pops in a harrowing live-to-picture performance of John Williams’ iconic score to “Jurassic Park.” And on Sunday, Yo-Yo Ma will bring magic to Robert Schumann’s cello concerto.
Tanglewood 2024 has focused on Russian-born Sergei Koussevitzky, the BSO’s ninth conductor and commissioner of such works as Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms” and Bartok’s “Concerto for Orchestra.” So it has been a good summer for folks who can’t get enough of Russian composers like Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, and others.
Midori returns to Tanglewood for the 23rd time, having first performed there in 1986 with Leonard Bernstein conducting his own “Serenade for Violin and String Orchestra.” Her performance of Prokofiev’s first violin concerto on Friday, August 16, will be one of the highlights of the summer’s Russian programming, and on this piece you can expect Midori to live up to her 40-plus-year reputation for technical precision, emotional depth, and the ability to bring a unique voice to every piece she plays. Koussevitzky didn’t commission the work, but he did conduct the Paris Opera Orchestra in its 1923 premiere, as well as the American premiere two years later in Symphony Hall.
Midori is the Dorothy Richard Starling Chair in Violin Studies at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, as well as the newly appointed artistic director of Ravinia Steans Music Institute’s piano and strings program.
Performing a film score live to picture can be more difficult than recording the original orchestral score on a soundstage. That is because the Pops musicians must not only replicate every note of the original score perfectly, but do so without interruption until intermission or the end of the film. It is business as usual for the players, who follow the conductor as they always do. And for musicians who win Grammy awards for their Shostakovich performances, Williams’ scores are relatively straightforward. It is the conductor who must bear all the pressure of keeping the orchestra in sync with the picture. Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart calls it “a really big challenge. It’s really one of the toughest things that I’ve had to do as a conductor.”
They never mess it up.
Yo-Yo Ma concludes the weekend with the cello concerto of Robert Schumann, who deserves newly invented words to describe his music. Don’t be fooled by the “Romantic” label. Sure, his music comes from that period, and it is highly emotional. But his harmonic vocabulary is entirely his own—though you will hear echoes of it in Brahms’ music. No one is better suited to play Schumann with all of the intensity, nuance, and musicality it deserves than Yo-Yo Ma.
Hear Midori, Yo-Yo Ma, and film music by John Williams at Tanglewood on the weekend of August 16 through 18. Tickets are available here.
