This Weekend's Programs in Brief

July 25-27, 2025

A major new work by John Williams, a full-fledged Concerto for Piano and Orchestra composed for and premiered by Emanuel Ax with Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, at Tanglewood—it speaks for itself. This warm coming-together of artists who have a deep connection with Tanglewood, its history, and its future can only be topped by the performance itself on Saturday evening in the Shed. In this brilliant, virtuoso concerto, Williams draws on his lifelong love of the piano and some of its most individual talents: its three movements pay homage to jazz greats Art Tatum, Bill Evans, and Oscar Peterson. The concerto shares the Saturday concert with Gustav Mahler’s powerful and lyrical Symphony No. 1. With its broad melodies, hints of birdsong, and its second-movement rustic dance, the symphony channels Mahler’s love of the outdoors and the countryside while also serving as a true orchestral showpiece. 

The weekend opens with Andris Nelsons leading acclaimed young Spanish violinist María Dueñas, making her debut with Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, one of the most popular concertos in the repertoire. Also on the program are works suggesting contemplation and reflection. J.S. Bach’s gorgeous and familiar Air (“on the G string”) is from his Overture No. 3, one of four in a series of symphony-like orchestral works. Mahler’s Adagio from his Symphony No. 10 is a soul-searching movement whose emotional intensity is in part a reaction to his learning that his wife Alma was considering leaving him. This was the only nearly complete movement of the symphony, left unfinished upon Mahler’s death in 1911. Felix Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage is an overture mirroring a pair of poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: the “calm sea” is solemn and tranquil, the “prosperous voyage” optimistic and exciting. 

Sunday’s concert features another outstanding pianist, Lang Lang, playing Camille Saint-Saëns’s scintillating Piano Concerto No. 2, one of the best known of the composer’s works. Saint-Saëns, a virtuoso pianist himself, played its premiere in Paris in December 1868. The concert opens with Mexican composer and 2025 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music Director Gabriela Ortiz’s La Calaca, a hypnotically rhythmic, dancing work whose title refers to the stylized, music-loving skeleton figures of Day of the Dead celebrations. Beethoven’s sunny Pastoral Symphony—complete with birdsong, a country dance, and a brief (musical) summer storm—completes the program. 

Robert Kirzinger