PERSPECTIVE — “I think the word visionary is often overused, but in Koussevitzky’s case, it is absolutely apropos,” said Anthony Fogg, vice president of artistic planning for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. We were talking on a video call about the legacy of Serge Koussevitzky (1874-1951), the ninth conductor of the orchestra and the first to hold the title of music director. The year 2024 marks the 150th anniversary of the Russian American conductor’s birth and the 100th anniversary of his appointment to the Boston Symphony, where he reigned for 25 years.
From July 26–28, the orchestra is celebrating Koussevitzky — who not only elevated the ensemble to one of the best in the world but also established a legacy for commissioning new music — with three programs that include his own Double Bass Concerto, with principal bass Edwin Barker performing the solo part on Koussevitzky’s double bass; Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony, one of the conductor’s signature pieces; and Copland’s Piano Concerto, which Koussevitzky commissioned and premiered with Copland as soloist.
Members of the Music Critics Association of North America, who are convening for their annual meeting this weekend at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, Mass., will be attending these Koussevitzky-themed concerts and events in conjunction with the annual Festival of Contemporary Music. Fogg and Bridget Carr, the Boston Symphony’s archivist, offered their thoughts about what makes Koussevitzky such a phenomenal figure.
Carr remarked on the “whole story of his rise, from being a poor country musician to becoming a double-bass virtuoso to then having this dream of being a conductor to then founding a music publishing business so that living composers could be published, and that the composers could share in the profit of that. And then always having had this dream of founding a music center and wanting to educate the next generation.”
Koussevitzky was born on July 26, 1874, in Tver Oblast, outside Moscow, to a musical family of modest means. He began his career as an orchestral double bassist, later breaking out as a virtuoso soloist. In 1908, he hired the Berlin Philharmonic in order to make his conducting debut with that august institution. The following year, he founded his publishing company, Éditions Russes de Musique, to promote living composers, with Rachmaninoff as artistic adviser. The company’s publications included music by Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Scriabin. He moved to Paris during the Russian Revolution and, from 1921 to 1928, organized the Concerts Koussevitzky, which included contemporary music. The impact of those early concerts convinced the Boston Symphony to offer him the job as its chief conductor.
The Russian émigré was 50 when he was appointed in Boston during the fall of 1924, succeeding Pierre Monteux. His first season included the new music he had performed at the Concerts Koussevitzky, including Honegger’s Pacific 231 and Scriabin’s The Poem of Ecstasy. He had met the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger when she was working with Copland; Koussevitzky had encouraged Copland to compose an organ concerto for him to conduct and for Boulanger to perform, which resulted in the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra (1925). Over his 25 years leading the orchestra, Koussevitzky programmed more than 150 American works.
His legacy for new music was solidified in 1929-1931, when he convinced the Boston Symphony trustees to commission new music from important composers of the day to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the orchestra, in 1931. The organization had never paid a composer to create new works before. Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 4, Honegger’s Symphony No. 1, and Respighi’s Metamorphoseon, Modi XII were commissioned for the anniversary.
“He also wanted to create a new school of American composition somewhat in the spirit of how he’d created this Russian school through the publishing house,” said Fogg. That led to the creation of the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in 1942, in memory of his wife Natalie, who had recently died. The daughter of a wealthy tea merchant, Natalie had shared her husband’s vision and funded a large part of his career. The foundation, which is now administered by the Library of Congress, has supported more than 400 works, including Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie, premiered by the Boston Symphony, and Britten’s Peter Grimes, whose American premiere took place at Tanglewood (both led by Koussevitzky’s most famous protegé, Leonard Bernstein).
What is Tanglewood today started to take shape in the mid-1930s. “Henry Hadley [a composer and conductor] had this idea that he wanted to give concerts outside in the Berkshires, so he was driving around looking for a place,” Carr said. “He needed an organizer, so he came across [the philanthropist] Gertrude Robinson Smith, who was a force of nature, and together they got the first Berkshire Symphonic Festival concerts going in 1934.”
In the early years, 1934 and 1935, the musicians were members of the New York Philharmonic, not Boston, and the concerts took place on property other than the current Tanglewood grounds. The festival organizers then asked the Boston Symphony to participate, the first time in 1936. That year, the summer cottage of Mary Aspinall Tappan was given as a gift to the Boston Symphony as permanent home for the festival. “Up until that time, the BSO was just the talent, but when the estate was given to them, that kind of sealed the future role that the BSO would have in the festival,” Carr said.
The Koussevitzky Music Shed, where the three main concerts will take place this weekend, was built in 1938. The following year, the Koussevitzkys bought the Buckingham estate known as Bald Head Farm in Lenox as their permanent home in the Berkshires; they renamed it Seranak. “He was very astute,” said Fogg. “He saw that the location of Tanglewood was roughly equidistant from two major centers of population, New York and Boston, so he could draw audiences from both places.”
Carr has been in charge of the archives since 1991. “We have an incredibly robust audio-visual collection, especially our radio broadcast tapes that date back to the 40s,” she said. “A lot of these are radio broadcasts of Boston Symphony, Boston Pops, and Tanglewood concerts. We have more than 10,000 reel-to-reel tapes. One of our priorities is to get a record of what each concert sounded like and get it preserved.”
Among the special projects for the Koussevitzky celebration, the team prepared an exhibition of Koussevitzky memorabilia, which is on view at Tanglewood, and the orchestra is releasing a series of concerts from its radio archives this summer. “I listened to a lot of broadcast recordings,” said Fogg from his office in the back of the Shed, “and the style of playing of the orchestra is very much of its time, quite free, rhythmically. There’s a brilliance in the sound, especially in the strings. As a double-bass player, he loved to have a firm foundation to the sound. He gets a palette of colors from the orchestra that is quite extraordinary. There’s a recording of the 1812 Overture that we’re releasing — it’s like no other 1812 that you’ve ever heard. It’s not square and militaristic; it’s this sort of free fantasy. He had the orchestra at a point, musically, where they would just go with him, following this sort of free approach. It was quite amazing.”
Another aspect of Koussevitzky’s legacy is the Tanglewood Music Center (originally the Berkshire Music Center), a summer institute for students offering advanced study, including orchestra participation and classes in conducting and composition. For the inaugural class, in 1940, Copland was part of the faculty. Bernstein, a soon-to-become celebrity, trained under Koussevitzky that year and gave the last concert of his life there, with the Boston Symphony, in 1990. Among recent conducting fellows who have gone on to major careers are Karina Canellakis, Ken-David Masur, and Ruth Reinhardt. This year’s conducting fellows are Ross Jamie Collins and Na’Zir McFadden, training with BSO music director Andris Nelsons, who is leading the main concerts this weekend.
In 2019, a revamped Tanglewood Learning Institute was launched at the Linde Center for Music and Learning — a four-building complex for concerts and rehearsal space that turned Tanglewood, for the first time in its history, into a year-round destination. With the new buildings and programs, said Carr, “we’re coming full circle, in many ways, back to Koussevitzky’s original vision.”
Koussevitzky’s Double Bass Concerto (1905), on Friday’s program, was last performed by the Boston Symphony in 1981, also with Barker performing the lyrical solo part. (He retires from the orchestra this summer after 48 seasons as principal bass.) On the same program are Steven Mackey’s Urban Ocean (2013) and Scriabin’s Prometheus — with pianist Yefim Bronfman — which Koussevitzky conducted at its 1911 premiere in Moscow. The inclusion of contemporary music fits in with Koussevitzky’s vision, and with the Festival of Contemporary Music, curated this summer by Mackey and Tania León. The latter’s Stride, which won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, is on Saturday’s BSO program with Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto, featuring soloist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony made a famous recording of the concerto in 1946 with pianist William Kapell.
Sunday’s concert, including Copland’s Piano Concerto, closes with Stravinsky’s choral Symphony of Psalms, one of the Koussevitzky Music Foundation commissions to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Boston Symphony, which gave the American premiere in 1930 under Koussevitzky. Sung by the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, it will be a poignant finale to the celebration of this visionary, whose impact continues to this day. “He had a great yearning to do something broader for the state of music,” said Fogg. “Which is probably the best I can say about him.”
