LENOX, Mass. — Tanglewood’s last July weekend honored the 150th birthday of Serge Koussevitzky, the center’s founder, driving force, and local deity. A double bass virtuoso, Koussevitzky emigrated from his native Russia to Paris, emerging like a butterfly, as a successful conductor who moved to the United States, ending up in Boston in 1924 and serving as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 25 years. His skills lifted the orchestra to lasting world-class fame, adding to its standard programs pieces he commissioned and performed that are now touchstones of the repertoire.
In 1940, he also brought to life his vision of a summer home for members of the Boston Symphony in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts where they could play chamber music, concertize, and teach young performers who would come there to study.
Among his early Tanglewood acolytes (the first class was in 1940) were Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss, and Leonard Bernstein, the last of whom refused Koussevitzky’s advice to change his name to something less Jewish-sounding. More recently, Tanglewood acquired Highwood, a neighboring estate, and expanded its study and chamber performance activities in added buildings.
Now, in the middle of every Tanglewood season, the Highwood property is the principal site of a five-day Festival of Contemporary Music featuring multiple daily concerts of new music performed by the amazing young professionals of the Tanglewood Music Center, who are coached by Boston Symphony players.
Time was when, during this new-music period, BSO programs in the main venue, now called the Koussevitzky Music Shed, hid behind Beethoven, Mozart, and other classics to avoid scaring off paying audiences from “all this modern stuff.” Most new-music concerts at Tanglewood are free.
This year, BSO music director Andris Nelsons followed in the footsteps of Koussevitzky, the champion of new music. On a weekend highlighting Tanglewood’s visionary founder, Nelsons did himself proud, following vice president for artistic planning Anthony Fogg’s fearless directive to put aside the usual comforting favorites (aside from Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony) and instead program three concerts of new and seldom-heard works, complementing what was being heard in Seiji Ozawa Hall and its nearby, smaller venues.
For the first time, listeners felt a two-way flow between big orchestral and new chamber works. Composers Steven Mackey and Tania León, coordinators and curators of the new-music festival, were represented and visible in both venues. Mackey’s colorful Urban Ocean, which began Friday’s BSO program, was composed for the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, Cal. It displayed blatting trombones, high squeals, bass drum, and completely tonal low strings like a rolling ocean. The middle was festive and dance-like.
Nelsons is in good shape; his black belt in taekwondo improves his conducting strength. He’s lost weight and doesn’t need to grasp the conductor’s stand for support.
Koussevitzky did not do a lot of composing. His Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra suggests that he would soon find his strength elsewhere. Koussevitzky’s own bass fiddle was played Friday by the orchestra’s formidable principal bass Edwin Barker, who is retiring this year after 47 seasons. The instrument’s gentle, plangent tone sort of melts into the atmosphere, and the piece’s late-Romantic style makes you wonder if you’ve heard it somewhere else. Maybe “Koussy” wished he could be Dvořák, or someone similar to him. Maybe it’s like the Palm Court Trio.
Saturday’s fiery rarities were Sibelius’ early, forceful Origin of Fire with men’s chorus and Scriabin’s 1911 tone poem Prometheus: The Poem of Fire with piano and chorus, which listeners will tell you is eccentric, if not nuts. (Yefim Bronfman, the capable pianist in this performance, agrees.) With swaths of sound, two harps, and bass drum, its wild sonorities seemed newer than the Mackey. The non-tuneful piano part trembled and banged, the orchestra whispered and shouted, and all others were silent save the tickling high percussion. The audience, surprisingly, loved it all.
León is a petite, smiling 81-year-old ball of energy. Saturday’s concert opened with her 2019 percussive, Pulitzer Prize-winning Stride. Part of the New York Philharmonic’s Project 19, it pushes forward with firm steps, ending with festive, lively tubular bells. León explained that growing up in Cuba, she had heard Bernstein’s music. (She studied conducting with him at Tanglewood in the late 1970s.) She will have another commissioned work introduced next fall in Boston.
Aram Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto in D-flat major moves from one splash to the next, some punctuated with quiet. It was very well played by Jean-Yves Thibaudet, who has long been associated with the 1942 piece and others from around the same period: Ravel, Gershwin, Milhaud.
Sunday’s concert opened with James Lee III’s Freedom’s Genuine Dawn, narrated by Thomas Warfield (nephew of the eminent bass-baritone William Warfield). Racial rage overcame the music here. The clear, skillfully projected words were too complex and too many.
Copland was born in 1900, and his 1927 Piano Concerto was pre-Appalachian Spring, which is to say in the beloved Copland idiom but minus the enduring appeal. Paul Lewis was a riveting soloist, and the finale was flat-out whoopie jazz, with zip.
The second half of the concert began with Randall Thompson’s unaccompanied Alleluia, composed for Tanglewood and annually sung by all at the center’s opening exercises. Nelsons was unable to put his stamp on it, either there or in Sunday’s concert. It’s a passionate crescendo, not a dough-swirling show, and Nelsons repeats his conceptual mistake each time he leads it. (Plus the Tanglewood Festival Chorus used scores, as if the piece were unfamiliar here.)
In this concert, Alleluia became an introduction to Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, another Koussevitzky commission, last conducted here by Nelsons in 2012. The piece should have glowed in the hands of the well-trained TFC, but it’s not one of Stravinsky’s more attractive pieces. Some of his works are long-lasting favorites, but this one, even for choir buffs, misses the pull and charm of a classical hit. It’s graceful, but Elijah’s fiery chariot lacked flames.
Weather, which can be evil enough to cancel an outdoor concert, smiled as if approving the novel program connections. Maybe in Koussevitzky’s nearby hilltop home, his spirit was having a happy birthday.
