Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Summer music highlights: Tanglewood Festival. Glimmerglass Opera
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Summer music highlights: Tanglewood Festival. Glimmerglass Opera
Vacationing in Upstate New York, in the woods where minimum property size is zoned foe farming at 7 acres (some of us are grandfathered at low numbers) has advantages and disadvantages. Television comes in via satellite, and internet is abominable dial-up, but we are close to the Tanglewood Festival, one hour north.
This is the US best known music festival, initiated in the 1930 with the gift of the Tappan family estate of 216 acres in the Berkshires, and the invitation of the Boston Symphony and its conductor Serge Koussevitzky to make a summer home there. The rest is history, site design by Eliel Saarinen, construction of the music center, the long reign of Music Director Seiji Ozava, replaced by Jimmy Levine, who splits the BSO duty with New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
The Tanglewood weekend program, from late June through August, typically consists of a Friday 8:30 PM concert in the big building, the Shed, then a 10:30 AM rehearsal of the Saturday 8:30 PM or the Sunday 2:30 PM concert, then the two concerts, in the Shed. Interspersed are off-hours chamber or vocal music concerts at the smaller Ozava Hall, and special weekday events,
The Sunday August 14 all Brahms concert was dedicated to Leonard Bernstein, who died October 14, 1990. We attended the 10:30 rehearsal of the Saturday concert, which included Sergei Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, a favorite here and also of Bernstein’s. It was in his 1960s Young Peoples Concert series, a beautiful work and a teaching tool, to identify instruments.
The Saturday rehearsals have changed since last year, the tickets are sold in $20 and $30 price ranges and they are for numbered seats. When we commented, the volunteers offered a story of injuries suffered when people aggressively climbed to the more desirable spots. Anyway, the Shed was nearly filled, and another thousand or two listeners with lawn chairs sat in the huge meadow, fairly well shaded by giant trees. Looking at the crowd, one wondered whether there were any doctors left in Boston for the weekend.
The rehearsal, conducted by guest director Christoph von Dohnanyi, famous as the leader of the Cleveland Symphony for 20 years and now ranging world-wide, started with Robert Schumann’s Cello Concerto No. 1 in C Minor, with guest soloist Yo-Yo Ma, whose style is very muscular, and includes directing the violins. After playing through, the conductor went into a detailed replay of the transitions, as well as some of Yo-Yo Ma’s solos. So much time was taken up, and the Johannes Brahms Symphony No. 1 and my patiently awaited Prokofiev ended up being rehearsed in snatches, without a play-through. One begins to wonder whether the great BSO, after Seiji Ozawa’s departure led by James Levine, who splits his time between Boston and New York’s Met Opera, might be best served by a full time musical director. The beloved Jimmy is not all that well physically, and is rushing through his days all too fast.
Anyway, Tanglewood was good, an offset to the nervous political scene. I’m now talking local, not national. Upstate is largely Republican country, and the local politics of this small and relatively poor farming community involve a contest between a town supervisor and the largely oldtime board, mostly locally born, a rich newcomer who wants to build a racing track and spreads his largesse around, and the more recent NYC retirees, who want peace and quiet maintained, and strive for equitable taxes. Actually, all news is local as oldtime Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill once declared, and it applies here. Family farming is marginal, and there is lack of exportable product, and new jobs are few. Technology companies cannot move in because of lack of broadband facilities, and the available jobs are in the minimum wage category. Andrew Cuomo to note.
Music lovers who vacation along the route of Taconic Parkway, have another pleasure for them, if they cross the picturesque Catskill Mountains, driving to Cooperstown, in Otsego County, where the Glimmerglass Festival holds its summer session. Funded in 1975 and in 1987 relocated on an estate donated by the Goodyear family, this year it has a four-opera season, with Bizet’s Carmen, Cherubini’s Medea, Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun, and a new double bill, consisting of Later The Same Evening, composed by John Musto, libretto by John Campbell, and A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck, composed by Jeanine Tesori, with libretto by Tony Kushner.
The new operas, heavy on words and requiring full attention to the text board above the stage, are an attention problem. A Blizzard is more easily followed, featuring a quarrel between playwright Eugene O’Neill and his wife, with the writer nearly dying. Interspersed with little playful songlets, the arias are easy to follow and hold your interest.
Later The Same Evening, based on five unhappy lives based on five paintings by Edward Hopper, featuring his usual lonely people sitting in empty coffee shops, has convoluted texts about the sad fortunes declaimed in dull dirges. Someone joked that Later was shown first, to avoid the O’Neill fans walking out. Grand opera has no future if it depends on modern composers and dull non-theatrical librettos for its continued existence. Anthony Tommasini of the New York Timescannot say this, but this paper can. Good luck!
Summer music highlights: Tanglewood Festival. Glimmerglass Opera
Vacationing in Upstate New York, in the woods where minimum property size is zoned foe farming at 7 acres (some of us are grandfathered at low numbers) has advantages and disadvantages. Television comes in via satellite, and internet is abominable dial-up, but we are close to the Tanglewood Festival, one hour north.
This is the US best known music festival, initiated in the 1930 with the gift of the Tappan family estate of 216 acres in the Berkshires, and the invitation of the Boston Symphony and its conductor Serge Koussevitzky to make a summer home there. The rest is history, site design by Eliel Saarinen, construction of the music center, the long reign of Music Director Seiji Ozava, replaced by Jimmy Levine, who splits the BSO duty with New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
The Tanglewood weekend program, from late June through August, typically consists of a Friday 8:30 PM concert in the big building, the Shed, then a 10:30 AM rehearsal of the Saturday 8:30 PM or the Sunday 2:30 PM concert, then the two concerts, in the Shed. Interspersed are off-hours chamber or vocal music concerts at the smaller Ozava Hall, and special weekday events,
The Sunday August 14 all Brahms concert was dedicated to Leonard Bernstein, who died October 14, 1990. We attended the 10:30 rehearsal of the Saturday concert, which included Sergei Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, a favorite here and also of Bernstein’s. It was in his 1960s Young Peoples Concert series, a beautiful work and a teaching tool, to identify instruments.
The Saturday rehearsals have changed since last year, the tickets are sold in $20 and $30 price ranges and they are for numbered seats. When we commented, the volunteers offered a story of injuries suffered when people aggressively climbed to the more desirable spots. Anyway, the Shed was nearly filled, and another thousand or two listeners with lawn chairs sat in the huge meadow, fairly well shaded by giant trees. Looking at the crowd, one wondered whether there were any doctors left in Boston for the weekend.
The rehearsal, conducted by guest director Christoph von Dohnanyi, famous as the leader of the Cleveland Symphony for 20 years and now ranging world-wide, started with Robert Schumann’s Cello Concerto No. 1 in C Minor, with guest soloist Yo-Yo Ma, whose style is very muscular, and includes directing the violins. After playing through, the conductor went into a detailed replay of the transitions, as well as some of Yo-Yo Ma’s solos. So much time was taken up, and the Johannes Brahms Symphony No. 1 and my patiently awaited Prokofiev ended up being rehearsed in snatches, without a play-through. One begins to wonder whether the great BSO, after Seiji Ozawa’s departure led by James Levine, who splits his time between Boston and New York’s Met Opera, might be best served by a full time musical director. The beloved Jimmy is not all that well physically, and is rushing through his days all too fast.
Anyway, Tanglewood was good, an offset to the nervous political scene. I’m now talking local, not national. Upstate is largely Republican country, and the local politics of this small and relatively poor farming community involve a contest between a town supervisor and the largely oldtime board, mostly locally born, a rich newcomer who wants to build a racing track and spreads his largesse around, and the more recent NYC retirees, who want peace and quiet maintained, and strive for equitable taxes. Actually, all news is local as oldtime Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill once declared, and it applies here. Family farming is marginal, and there is lack of exportable product, and new jobs are few. Technology companies cannot move in because of lack of broadband facilities, and the available jobs are in the minimum wage category. Andrew Cuomo to note.
Music lovers who vacation along the route of Taconic Parkway, have another pleasure for them, if they cross the picturesque Catskill Mountains, driving to Cooperstown, in Otsego County, where the Glimmerglass Festival holds its summer session. Funded in 1975 and in 1987 relocated on an estate donated by the Goodyear family, this year it has a four-opera season, with Bizet’s Carmen, Cherubini’s Medea, Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun, and a new double bill, consisting of Later The Same Evening, composed by John Musto, libretto by John Campbell, and A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck, composed by Jeanine Tesori, with libretto by Tony Kushner.
The new operas, heavy on words and requiring full attention to the text board above the stage, are an attention problem. A Blizzard is more easily followed, featuring a quarrel between playwright Eugene O’Neill and his wife, with the writer nearly dying. Interspersed with little playful songlets, the arias are easy to follow and hold your interest.
Later The Same Evening, based on five unhappy lives based on five paintings by Edward Hopper, featuring his usual lonely people sitting in empty coffee shops, has convoluted texts about the sad fortunes declaimed in dull dirges. Someone joked that Later was shown first, to avoid the O’Neill fans walking out. Grand opera has no future if it depends on modern composers and dull non-theatrical librettos for its continued existence. Anthony Tommasini of the New York Timescannot say this, but this paper can. Good luck!
Labels: glimmerglass, tanglewood
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 7:57 AM 
