Tanglewood Goes Online for Summer Festival
Nelsons on the Podium and in Class
By: Susan Hall - Jul 06, 2020
Tanglewood is giving us a rich streaming of musical concerts, master classes and intra-artists conversations this summer. A summer full of music comes to our homes.
Encore performances of treasured performances can be accessed. Andris Nelsons, the BSO's music director, conducted the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra last summer, in a rousing introduction to Walkere. The full opera had been presented over three days, Bayreuth in Massachusetts. Christine Goerke and Stephanie Blythe graced the stage with a strong supporting cast. These are moments to be treasured forever. We don't have to try to conjure them up. The BSO is giving them to us right now. Just click.
You can share a master class conducted by Maestro Nelsons. He said he was nervous about teaching, but seems a natural.
I am a Gil Shaham fan and picked out a solo performance he gave at Tanglewood earlier this summer. Emailing with composer Scott Wheeler, Shaham suggested Wheeler compose a solo piece for him. The result, Isolation Rag, is just the right combination of an artist itching to be with his friends and collaborators and also sharing with a live audience. Shaham is not isolated as he performs, and neither are we.
He chose Max Raimi's short etude, Anger Management. Raimi is a violist with the Chicago Symphony, and of the old school of performing composers like Brahms, Liszt and Mendelssohn.
Raimi started composing when he went to Interlochen to study viola. His fellow students laughed at him for writing melodies. Yet when Riccardo Muti heard his version of the University of Michigan’s fight song, he asked to see more of his music and voilà.
Shaham also plucked composers William Bolsom, J.S. Bach and Prokoviev from his cornucopia.
Hearing Shaham solo for forty minutes suits the stream form well. The performance was exquisite, as it always is with Shaham, no matter what crazy adventure he undertakes. This is part of Tanglewood's Great Performer series.
You can pick and choose on the site. Try it.