Andris Nelsons leads the Boston Symphony Orchestra with piano soloist Emanuel Ax in Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto at Tanglewood on July 10, 2021. Hilary Scott photograph
With a weekend of live performances beginning July 9, the Boston Symphony Orchestra returned to its Tanglewood summer home after a year’s hiatus.
The classical music industry stands at a crossroads—audiences adapting to new normals, live performances unevenly resuming, leadership under intense scrutiny after last year’s social upheaval. Tanglewood’s two opening programs focused a spotlight on the times.
Friday evening’s unofficial opening night featured the Knights, with Eric Jacobsen conducting. Pianist Aaron Diehl and his trio joined the venturesome orchestra in a jazz-tinged program of Ravel and Gershwin, Vijay Iyer and Mary Lou Williams.
Saturday’s BSO program featured an overture, a concerto and a symphony: Beethoven.
The two programs could not have categorized the challenges facing classical music any more vividly.
Attendance was limited to half-capacity, as it will be for the entire summer. There will be no intermissions and no vocal music this season. Masks are optional, and were rarely worn. Social distancing seemed like last year’s business. With several thousand in the Shed, and the lawn outside filled with many more returnees, it felt like little had changed.
Audiences embraced both programs equally. The Knights played with verve, and elastic virtuosity, making Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin sound tender, making Iyer’s Crisis Modes hop, and re-introducing Williams Zodiac Suite—a 1940s work by a composer who was a popular big-band arranger—with genuine enthusiasm.
Diehl champions Williams, and played insightfully, melding the four selected movements with the orchestra and his trio. Zodiac Suite—in ways a concerto for jazz trio and orchestra—offered sophisticated amalgam with classical structures, jazz phrases and just plain bounce.
The BSO’s official return on Saturday meant all-Beethoven, and many ovations. When the orchestra first took the stage, with ceremony. When Nelsons joined them. When Nelsons welcomed newly named CEO Gail Samuel onstage after the overture for remarks. When Emanuel Ax fulfilled everyone’s longing with his habitually elegant playing in the Emperor Concerto. And, of course, when it was over, and cathartic bursts filled the Shed.
“What extraordinary feelings,” Nelsons said, “how dramatic this period has been.”
Ax and the orchestra both seemed uneasy when the Emperor began. The noble opening—the orchestra launching unison chords, interrupting as the soloist flies up and down the keyboard to culminate in trills—sounded like warmups, with only some of the emphatic delivery delivered.
But Ax made the slow movement melt. Accompanied only by muted strings and restrained winds, he shaped familiar phrases so they sounded immediate, alive somehow in an original way. We are easily touched these days, and the emotional weight of months drifted away at Beethoven’s familiar melody—known to most as “Somewhere (There’s a Place for Us),” thanks to Bernstein’s pilfering—with Ax’s calm precision.
There was nothing passé, or irrelevant, about this repertory choice or its performance. Ax plays Beethoven brilliantly, with the same elegant virtuosity that he has for more than five decades.
Nelsons’s Fifth sounded crisp and starched. The BSO played with pent-up attention, and Nelsons—coming off a recorded cycle of Beethoven symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, recorded in 2019 on Deutsche Grammophon—knew what he wanted. Returning to live Beethoven after one year hiatus felt grounded.
The concerts posed questions with their choices, and offered answers in real time. The Knights’ program seemed a better possibility for the future. Every organization should know that inclusion and diversity must be addressed.
And that happens because of artists like Aaron Diehl, making career-defining choices to promote repertory like the Zodiac Suite. (He also performed the work recently with the New York Philharmonic, a stream issued in February.) This is how inclusion happens: an artist performs a work, and keeps performing it.
But for this weekend, there seemed no obligation to forget the past. Not in a time of healing. A perceptive all-Beethoven program returns listeners not only to the concert hall, but also returns them to the reasons they invest in music: Complexity, emotional energy—the sense of human possibility.
Beethoven wanted it; we do as well. The challenge would be to embrace more—more enthusiastically, more stubbornly.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Tanglewood season runs through August 16. Select Tanglewood performances will be made available online weekly at BSO NOW, the orchestra’s streaming portal. bso.org; 888 266-1200.
NOTE: A different version of this review ran on Musical America
Keith Powers covers music for Gannett New England, Opera News and Leonore Overture. Follow @PowersKeith; email to keithmichaelpowers@gmail.com.