BSO Concerts

The BSO’s Opening Night concert begins with a benediction by Leonard Bernstein, a setting in Hebrew for baritone that was the composer’s last work with orchestra; baritone Jack Canfield makes his BSO debut. The brilliant Chinese pianist Yuja Wang performs Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1, which the composer premiered himself with Hector Berlioz conducting in 1855. Liszt transformed the concerto's main thematic ideas throughout the piece, contrasting displays of drama and virtuosity with lush and tender lyricism. In its orchestral finesse and raw power, Igor Stravinsky’s revolutionary 1913 ballet score The Rite of Spring still astonishes after more than 100 years.

Ticket includes admission to 6pm Prelude Concert.

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BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons is joined by the dynamic soprano Nicole Cabell for this all-American program. The BSO premiered Samuel Barber’s gorgeously nostalgic Knoxville: Summer of 1915, based on a text by James Agee, in 1948. Complementing Barber’s small-city observations is George Gershwin’s exuberant, jazzy, and occasionally homesick tone poem An American in Paris. The multifaceted American pianist Aaron Diehl joins the orchestra for Duke Ellington’s New World A-Coming, transcribed from Ellington’s 1943 Carnegie Hall performance. Opening the program is Washington, D.C.-based composer Carlos Simon’s Motherboxx Connection, a 2021 piece inspired by the Afrofuturist-leaning artist collective Black Kirby.

Ticket includes admission to 6pm Prelude Concert.

Gates open at 5:30pm

The George W. and Florence N. Adams Concert
Endowed in Perpetuity

Virtuoso Swedish trumpeter and frequent BSO collaborator Håkan Hardenberger is the beneficiary of a new BSO-commissioned concerto from the British composer Helen Grime, a former Tanglewood Music Center Fellow with a dynamic, sparkling compositional style. Sergei Rachmaninoff’s gorgeous, short Vocalise for orchestra opens the program, which closes with the composer’s substantial Symphony No. 3, a late work characterized by scintillating orchestration and Rachmaninoff’s noted gift for long-spun melody and compelling musical narrative.

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An outstanding, nearly all-American cast, headlined by baritone Ryan McKinny in the title role, joins the BSO for one of the highlights of the summer, a concert opera led by Andris Nelsons. Wolfgang Mozart’s Don Giovanni is considered by many to be opera’s greatest dark comedy. Based on the archetype of the licentious Don Juan, Don Giovanni proceeds from rape and murder through to the Don’s ultimate, supernatural comeuppance. Along the way, Donna Elvira and Donna Anna, two of the women the Don has wronged, undermine his attempts at further reprehensible behavior, while his cynical servant Leporello walks a fine line between service and subterfuge.

Ticket includes admission to 6pm Prelude Concert.

Gates open at 5:30pm

The Turkish composer Fazil Say is also an outstanding pianist whose music is informed by a lifelong commitment to spontaneity and improvisation. He wrote his piano four-hands concerto Phoenix, a BSO co-commission receiving its American premiere in this concert, for the remarkable Dutch duo-pianists Lucas and Arthur Jussen, who gave the world premiere in January 2022 with the Munich Philharmonic. Featuring the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, Johannes Brahms’ masterpiece A German Requiem is an utterly personal but scarcely ceremonial work, setting Biblical texts in Martin Luther’s German translations. Returning as soloists with the BSO are Chinese soprano Ying Fang and Chinese bass-baritone Shenyang in their Tanglewood debuts.

This program is supported as part of the Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York.

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International star pianist and Tanglewood favorite Emanuel Ax, who will also play several chamber music performances in Ozawa Hall this summer, joins the BSO and returning conductor Karina Canellakis for Frédéric Chopin’s characteristically fluid and sparkling Piano Concerto No. 2, composed when he was just 19. Richard Wagner’s atmospheric Prelude to his opera Lohengrin demonstrates the composer’s astonishing imagination for orchestral texture and color. Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances wonderfully balances brilliant orchestration, lyricism, and rhythmic drive in what would be his final composition.

Ticket includes admission to the 6pm Prelude Concert.

Gates open at 5:30pm

Working in the middle of the 20th century, William Grant Still was a pioneer in using music of his African American heritage in works ranging from piano miniatures to opera. He wrote In Memoriam in 1943 after reading an announcement “that the first American soldier killed in World War II was a Negro soldier.” His somber piece honored the patriotism of all soldiers of color that served in the Allied armies. Soprano Latonia Moore sings American composer George Walker's Lilacs, a setting of Walt Whitman's ode to Abraham Lincoln. Commissioned by the BSO and premiered under Seiji Ozawa in February 1996, Lilacs went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music. Young superstar Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho is soloist in Johannes Brahms’ virtuosic and profound Piano Concerto No. 2 to complete the program.

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Over this weekend’s three BSO concerts, Andris Nelsons and his frequent collaborator, English pianist Paul Lewis, perform all five of Ludwig van Beethoven’s piano concertos. Each of these concerts opens with a BSO co-commissioned piece by an American woman. The American composer Julia Adolphe has been praised for the sonic and narrative inventiveness of her music. About her new work, she says, “Makeshift Castle captures contrasting states of permanence and ephemerality, of perseverance and disintegration, of determination and surrender.”
The Second and Third concertos were composed about five years apart. While both were strongly influenced by Wolfgang Mozart’s concertos, No. 3 in C minor exhibits more of Beethoven’s flair for drama and innovation.

Ticket includes admission to 6pm Prelude Concert.

Gates open at 5:30pm

Andris Nelsons and English pianist Paul Lewis collaborate on the second of three concerts encompassing all five of Ludwig van Beethoven’s piano concertos in one weekend. Each of these concerts opens with a BSO co-commissioned piece by an American woman. Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw’s Punctum, originally for string quartet, is a meditation on a brief moment in J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Beethoven’s First Concerto (actually composed later than No. 2) is strongly anchored in the Viennese Classicism of Wolfgang Mozart and Joseph Haydn. The Fourth Concerto, written at the same time as Beethoven’s opera Leonore, is in the composer’s warm, lyrical style, but also makes room for brilliant virtuosity.

Ticket includes admission to 6pm Prelude Concert.

Gates open at 5:30pm

The Boston Symphony Association of Volunteers Concert

Andris Nelsons and English pianist Paul Lewis collaborate on the third of three concerts encompassing all five of Ludwig van Beethoven’s piano concertos in one weekend. Each of these concerts opens with a BSO co-commissioned piece by an American woman. Elizabeth Ogonek was a Tanglewood Music Center Fellow in 2012. She has been a composer in residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and has also been commissioned by the BBC, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the London Symphony Orchestra. The French composer Louise Farrenc was one of the most accomplished musicians of the early Romantic era—an outstanding pianist, composer, and teacher. She wrote her Third Symphony in 1847. Completed in 1811, Beethoven’s Emperor was his final concerto, a work perfectly balancing virtuosity with substance and depth and epitomizing the composer’s “heroic” period.

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BSO Assistant Conductor Earl Lee makes his BSO debut, joined by the virtuosic piano duo of twins Christina and Michelle Naughton in their Tanglewood debuts performing Francis Poulenc’s impish neoclassical Concerto for Two Pianos. American composer Brian Raphael Nabors’ exciting and rhapsodic Pulse reflects on the varieties of experience that we might encounter every day. Felix Mendelssohn found inspiration for his intensely Romantic Symphony No. 3 on a trip to Scotland in 1829. Composed a decade later, it was his last completed symphony.

Ticket includes admission to 6pm Prelude Concert.

Gates open at 5:30pm

In her BSO debut, Grammy Award-winning conductor JoAnn Falletta is joined by violinist Joshua Bell, a Tanglewood mainstay since 1989, performing Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s beloved Violin Concerto. In the symphonic poems Fountains of Rome and Pines of Rome, Ottorino Respighi sought to capture the beauty of his country’s culture and landscape with colorful orchestral cityscapes evoking some of Rome’s most prominent features at different times of day. Opening the concert is the Puerto Rican composer Roberto Sierra’s Fandangos, an engaging, exploratory riff on one of the most characteristic Spanish dance forms. Sierra blends a classical approach with elements of Afro-Caribbean, South American, Central American, and Spanish musical traditions.

Ticket includes admission to 6pm Prelude Concert.

Gates open at 5:30pm

BSO Artistic Partner Thomas Adès is joined by Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos and French violist Antoine Tamestit in Wolfgang Mozart’s abundantly tuneful Sinfonia concertante. English composer Gustav Holst’s The Planets covers a vast range of musical territory, from the fleet energy of Mercury through the pounding aggression of Mars to the ethereal mysticism of Neptune, which here features the versatile women’s vocal group Lorelei Ensemble for the wordless choral part. Opening the concert is Adès’ own Shanty – Over the Sea. In this atmospheric string orchestra piece, many lines interweave to “create a widening seascape.”

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The Serge and Olga Koussevitzky Memorial Concert

Conductor Dima Slobodeniouk returns to Tanglewood and is joined by violinist Leonidas Kavakos in Felix Mendelssohn’s buoyant Violin Concerto, one of the most popular works in the genre. Henri Dutilleux’s 1964 Métaboles features the French composer’s intricately imaginative scoring and his innovative, organic approach to form. Claude Debussy’s revolutionary Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun, a contemplation of a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, is one of the clearest sources of 20th-century musical modernism. Maurice Ravel composed his Mother Goose for a friend’s children to play on piano, but its incisive character sketches and the brilliant orchestral canvas he later created make it a satisfying piece for any listener.

Ticket includes admission to 6pm Prelude Concert.

Gates open at 5:30pm

The Catherine and Paul Buttenwieser Concert

Romanian conductor Cristian Măcelaru, a 2010 Tanglewood Music Center Fellow, makes his BSO debut. Masquerade, by the U.S.-based English composer Anna Clyne, evokes the unique milieu of mid-18th-century London promenade concerts; this is the BSO’s first performance of Clyne’s music. Tanglewood favorite Yo-Yo Ma joins for Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto, one of the English composer’s final works, in part a profoundly lyrical meditation on a world in turmoil after the devastation of World War I. Claude Debussy’s La Mer—a work given its American premiere by the BSO in 1907—is virtually a three-movement symphony miraculously depicting in music the changing states of the sea and sun over the course of a day. Closing the concert is Romanian composer Georges Enescu, one of the 20th-century’s greatest musicians. His familiar Romanian Rhapsody No. 1, based on his country’s folk music, is a delightful and finely wrought staple of Pops orchestras.

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Unsuk CHIN subito con forza
BRUCH Violin Concerto in G minor
BRAHMS Symphony No. 1

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BSO Assistant Conductor Anna Rakitina leads frequent Tanglewood guest soloist Gil Shaham in Czech composer Antonín Dvořák’s great Violin Concerto, which sings with pungent Czech traditional rhythms and melodies. Three Russian works complete the program. Part-time composer and full-time scientist Alexander Borodin wrote his tremendously energetic and popular Polovtsian Dances for his opera Prince Igor, which remained unfinished at his early death. Two Dmitri Shostakovich rarities demonstrate his fantastic range. Purely for entertainment, the Suite for Variety Orchestra is a mishmash of pieces from various contexts—the Waltz is from his score from the 1955 film The First Echelon. Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 3, The First of May is a serious work for chorus and orchestra in praise of the Soviet revolution predating Joseph Stalin’s cynical crackdown on artistic creativity, which would have dangerous consequences for Shostakovich. This is the first performance of this piece by the BSO, part of its multi-season traversal of the composer’s complete symphonies.

Ticket includes admission to 6pm Prelude Concert.

Gates open at 5:30pm

Renowned conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, whose rich association with the BSO dates back to his time as a TMC Fellow (1968-69), is joined by the remarkable young Russian pianist Alexander Malofeev in his BSO and Tanglewood debut for Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3. Sparkling and lush, it is one of the most beloved and challenging concertos in the repertoire. Aaron Copland’s orchestral music epitomizes a distinctly American sound that persists in the concert hall and in film soundtracks. His Third Symphony, premiered by the BSO and Serge Koussevitzky in 1946, incorporates the bold and familiar Fanfare for the Common Man. The concert opens with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s brief, rousing Dubinushka, based on a tune he heard marching workers sing during the Russian Revolution of 1905 and not performed by the BSO since 1944.

Gates open at 5:30pm

Bert L. Smokler Memorial Concert

Michael Tilson Thomas leads the BSO in Tanglewood’s traditional season-ending performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s intensely expressive, innovative, but ultimately uplifting Symphony No. 9. Following three questing instrumental movements, the finale is a setting for soloists and chorus of the German playwright and poet Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” The symphony—Beethoven’s last, composed in 1825—was an immense success at its premiere and has since become a symbol of hope for the universal togetherness of humankind.

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