NY Times Tanglewood Review

[lennygoran]

A Weekend Can Span Centuries at Tanglewood

By JAMES R. OESTREICH AUG. 16, 2017


LENOX, Mass. — For most visitors, a weekend here at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, begins and ends in the Shed, where the standard symphonic literature is played from Friday through Sunday. But fuller, longer stays are also available at Seiji Ozawa Hall, sometimes leading to distant corners of the repertory.

These excursions can span centuries. My latest visit began gently on the evening of Wednesday, Aug. 9, with a concert version of Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen,” a delightful operatic confection from 1692 ever so loosely based on Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” performed by the venerable Handel & Haydn Society of Boston. And it ended raucously on Sunday morning with “Surface Tension,” a 2015 beat-down for four percussionists by the Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy.

The Boston Symphony, as one of the oldest (founded in 1881) and largest of its city’s cultural institutions, likes to support the others, and although the Handel & Haydn Society is much smaller, it is even older, having celebrated its 200th anniversary in 2015. It has admirably kept abreast of latter-day notions of appropriate Baroque performance practice, and the Purcell outing, led by its artistic director, Harry Christophers, was stylishly up to date, as it were.

“The Fairy Queen” skirts the principal action of “Midsummer,” throwing minor characters into relief, so a narration is useful, and the actress Antonia Christophers, Mr. Christophers’s daughter, made a fine, sassy job of it. Two soprano soloists, Sarah Brailey and Sonja DuToit Tengblad stood out in a raft of rapidly shifting characterizations, as did the countertenor Robin Blaze. Matthew Brook, a bass-baritone, was especially entertaining as the Drunken Poet, tippling lustily into his first entry.

A listener’s head spun a few hundred years forward the next day, as the Tanglewood Music Center’s annual Festival of Contemporary Music began in Ozawa Hall. That event — typically directed of late by one or two composers (and awaiting another, Thomas Adès, next season) — has veered wildly from year to year.
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It was at its most concentrated in 2008, when it was devoted entirely to music of Elliott Carter, in celebration of his 100th birthday. Last year it was programmed by Steven Stucky, who died months before the actual festival, and this year it was at its most democratic, programmed (curated, in the festival’s term) by three alumni of the Tanglewood Music Center: Jacob Greenberg, a pianist; Kathryn Bates, a cellist; and Nadia Sirota, a violist.

Mr. Greenberg’s program, which opened the festival, offered two works commissioned for the occasion, both with heady intellectual conceits but relatively little to move the soul. Nathan Davis’s “The Sand Reckoner,” a meditation on vast quantities and multitudes for six voices and celesta, supplemented a basic declamation of a text by Archimedes with words of the Wycliffe Bible, William Blake and a French children’s counting song. Anthony Cheung’s “All thorn, but cousin to your rose” set “The Art of Translation” by Vladimir Nabokov and tried to show how experiments with Google’s translation program could devolve into a game of telephone. Both brainy and clever, but no cigar.

Ms. Bates’s concert, on Friday, was generally more involving. The commissioned work was Kui Dong’s “A Night at Tanglewood,” a work for string quartet with the players doubling on an array of water glasses and bowls. Real depth came mainly at the end of the program, in the String Quartet No. 4 (“Amazing Grace,” 1973) by the veteran Ben Johnston, using an exotic tuning.

But Ms. Sirota’s program, on Sunday, was the most emotionally compelling of the three. It began with David Lang’s stunningly simple and lovely “just” (2014), a setting drawn from the Song of Songs, in a beautiful performance by three singers, Mary Bonhag, Fotina Naumenko and Jazimina MacNeil, and ended with Mr. Dennehy’s “Surface Tension.” Again there was a newly commissioned work, “Clip” by Nico Muhly, but even at a mere 10 minutes or so, it eventually wore out its welcome.


The Boston Symphony concert on Saturday evening opened with Julian Anderson’s “Incantesimi” (2016), just after a festival prelude concert had offered his ensemble work “Van Gogh Blue” (2015). Both showed a sure compositional hand but involved relocating players to puzzlingly little effect. Caroline Shaw’s string quartet “Blueprint” (2016) probed deeply in the prelude concert, but then, in a quick pizzicato exit, seemed to suggest that it had all been something of a joke.

And oh, yes, those Boston Symphony concerts. Giancarlo Guerrero conducted a riveting account of Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps” on Friday, no small achievement after short rehearsal, the norm for these summer programs. The Brahms Double Concerto that opened the concert, with Gil Shaham as violinist and Alisa Weilerstein as cellist, was a little lightweight and toothless by comparison.

Nikolaj Znaider gave a more muscular, yet still refined, performance of Brahms’s Violin Concerto after the Anderson work on Saturday. Juanjo Mena, substituting for an indisposed Christoph von Dohnanyi, conducted those pieces deftly and added a rousing rendition of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

Another concert packed in on Saturday afternoon at Ozawa Hall featured Ken-David Masur conducting the Young Artists Orchestra of the Boston University Tanglewood Institute. The reading of Lutoslawski’s difficult and underperformed Concerto for Orchestra was especially notable, with Mr. Masur showing complete command and the students playing at a near-professional level.

Alas, decamping early on Sunday, I had to miss the Boston Symphony concert that afternoon and the final contemporary program, on Monday. But I couldn’t have absorbed much more scintillation just then anyway.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/arts ... collection

[jbuck919]

Archimedes, commonly considered one of the three greatest mathematicians of all time and certainly the greatest of ancient times, supplied a text? I would love to know what it was.

[jserraglio]

I've got it! Eureka!

[jbuck919]

I've got it! Eureka!

Oh, good grief, that? (He is said to have used the word, which only means "I have found it" when exiting from the bath after realizing that his body displaced an equal volume of water.) It is surely the least of his accomplishments. His pure mathematics is still a challenge to modern students of the subject.

[jserraglio]

Archimedes . . . supplied a text? I would love to know what it was.

Archimedes, The Sand Reckoner. Nathan Davis titled his musical work after it and apparently had the singers declaim some of the text.

http://euclid.trentu.ca/math/sb/3810H/F ... ckoner.pdf


Vinay Parameswaran leads Festival of Contemporary Music cocurator Jacob Greenberg and Tanglewood Music Center Fellows in Nathan Davis’s “The Sand Reckoner” at Seiji Ozawa Hall on Thursday.