Oppressive heat, torrential storms and pesky mosquitoes plagued the opening weeks of the Tanglewood summer season. The show went on – as it always does, rain or shine – but those who come for the bucolic Berkshires atmosphere as much as the world-class musicianship surely felt a little short-changed. It felt like a welcome respite, then, when the atmosphere cooperated and delivered an ideal summer Sunday on 21st July, a perfect setting for the annual Leonard Bernstein Memorial Concert. Perhaps good old Lenny had a word with the Man Upstairs, but whatever the reason, it served as a great reminder why so many people come to Lenox each summer from far-flung locales.
So, too, did the concert itself. The program was a familiar assortment for these environs, but the Boston Symphony Orchestra ceded the stage of the Koussevitzky Shed to the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, composed of students in residence at the campus for the summer. These advanced young talents, under the baton of Andris Nelsons, began with Charles Ives’ Three Places in New England. These miniatures always have a special significance in Western Massachusetts, where one can literally drive past the Housatonic River at Stockbridge en route to hear the namesake piece. The dignified sense of repose Nelsons built within The ‘St Gaudens’ in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and His Colored Regiment) contrasted nicely with the distorted marches and Ragtime-tinged figures in Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Connecticut. The TCMO struck the right tranquil, dreamy note in the middle of this movement, before charging ahead toward the boisterous finale. The Housatonic at Stockbridge unspooled with a calm serenity, representing Ives’ interest in hymnody and his happiness in marriage.
Emanuel Ax joined the forces for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 3 in C minor. He is an artist who sometimes prizes elegance above moment-to-moment engagement with an orchestra, but perhaps teaming with these up-and-coming instrumentalists gave him a shot in the arm. Throughout the work’s three movements, Ax and company engaged in a winning tug of war: between playful, impish solo cadenzas and hefty orchestral passages in the Allegro con brio; refined pianism and lilting strings in the Largo; and a doubly charging atmosphere to drive home the Rondo finale. The orchestra still occasionally covered Ax in tutti passages, but Nelsons offered an immediate lesson in course correction, adjusting volume and phrasing with immediately perceptible results. After considerable applause, Ax demonstrated his penchant for intimacy and control with an encore of Chopin’s Nocturne in C sharp minor.
Nelsons loves to construct a massive wall of sound, so Also sprach Zarathustra suits his skills as well as any piece in the repertoire. He ratcheted up the opening movement to a massive C major blast that certainly would have shook the walls of the Shed, were there any. Still, there are 29 remaining minutes after that familiar entrance, and they need to be marshaled with care. Nelsons showed better skill at shaping long phrases and crafting the suspended sound world so integral to Strauss than he did two weeks ago in excerpts from Der Rosenkavalier and Die Frau ohne Schatten. Rather than the martinet-like tempos he sometimes favors in this music, there was an expansive sense of rubato. Many individual players shone, but pride of place belonged to principal violinist Emmalena Huning, who handled the solo lines of the Tanzlied with a rarefied Viennese air, and timpanist Matthew A West, who knew just when to push the line of good taste.
