Memories of the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra 8/16/26

On Sunday I went with Sam, a friend of 55 years, to hear a concert by the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra. This is composed of students from leading conservatories who come to the Berkshires for a summer of intense instruction and performance under the guidance of members of the Boston Symphony. These are young musicians of the highest caliber. TMC Fellows all receive full scholarships, with the only costs being an application fee and transportation to Lenox, MA. The only TMC fellow I have known, Jonathan Dlouhy, was appointed principal oboist of the Atlanta Symphony at the age of 23. That’s how good these kids are.

Mrs. Doc Robert and I heard the TMCO on August 10 in a challenging program of Ravel, Debussy and Bartók. It was a flawless performance of considerable beauty. Marin Alsop, a leading conductor, was to lead Sunday’s show, so Sam and I were looking forward to a fine afternoon of listening pleasure.

First up was a 2013 piece, Masquerade by Anna Clyne. It is common programming to pair a recent little-known work with better-known pieces as a stratagem to expose an audience to new music, a stratagem that sometimes leads to unhappy results. Sam and I had talked about this possibility while driving to the show. We needn’t have worried. Masquerade was a brash, in-your-face depiction of a London 18th-century pleasure palace. It was rhythmic and tonal and suited the name well. It ended on a most obvious dominant-tonic progression, leading me to turn to Sam and say “thank goodness for tonality.” It was fun to hear, and I would happily sit through it again.

There followed the Violin Concerto in G minor by Max Bruch, the first of three that he wrote. It was so popular in his lifetime that he came to revile his own work, as his second and third concertos never caught on with the world of virtuoso fiddlers. Soloist Ray Chen, an Australian whom the Mrs. and I had heard do the Mendelssohn Concerto in New York in February 2022, handled Bruch’s many difficulties with aplomb, making much of the beautiful slow second movement. The audience loved his performance, and he gave the same encore that he had played in 2022, his own transcription of Waltzing Matilda.

After intermission came the piece we had traveled to hear, the Symphony 5 in C# minor by Gustav Mahler. This is my favorite Mahler work. I have traveled to New York twice and once stayed an extra night in Philadelphia just to hear the piece. Those performances and a fourth that I heard in Amsterdam are reviewed in Ricochet.

https://ricochet.com/684177/memories-of-the-cleveland-orchestra-10-4-19/

https://ricochet.com/689120/memories-of-the-philadelphia-orchestra-10-17-19/

https://ricochet.com/1751576/memories-of-the-czech-philharmonic-12-4-24/

https://ricochet.com/1822228/memories-of-the-amsterdam-mahler-festival-may-9-18-2025/

Dating from 1902, the Mahler Fifth is notable for intense drama and contrast. Although it is about seventy-five minutes long, it passes by in a moment. German conductor Herbert von Karajan said that in a good performance of the Fifth, time stands still. I love the Mahler Fifth, the first symphony that I ever heard a major orchestra perform in October 1974 in Cleveland. It blew the callow 18-year-old chemistry student away. I have heard it eight times in 52 years, five of them in the last 7 years.

The overall impression the TMCO made was not as flawless as it had been in the August 10 concert, but Sunday’s performance was more than respectable. The opening funeral march and the stormy second movement were quite good. Balances and tempos were usually true (although the clarinets seemed prominent at times) and individual players were outstanding, especially principal trumpet Jesdelson Vasquez. The funeral march seemed a little dragged, deliberately so as if to emphasize the solemnity of the event depicted.

In the third movement, a jolly Scherzo, principal horn Connor Wood was not brought out front as had been the case in the Cleveland performance but played his obbligato part from his seat in the back. His robust sound filled the 5100 seat, open-sided Koussevitsky Music Shed—it’s such a huge space that vocal soloists are miked—with a powerful warmth. The third movement was not as nuanced as the first two. The upper strings were overbalanced much of the time, and the “little Klezmer moments” I referred to in my October 2019 review of the Cleveland performance at Carnegie Hall were largely lacking. This had to be a conscious choice by the conductor, for the TMCO musicians were fully capable of doing whatever she asked of them. About 80% of the way into the movement, things began to tire (it is a long movement), but before I knew it there came the “boom boom boom” of the bass drum, beginning a six-page crescendo leading to a riotous ending. This was very well performed.

The fourth movement is a famous Adagietto for strings and harp alone. A work of deep emotion, Mahler wrote it as a love poem to his young wife Alma a decade before she cuckolded him with a Bauhaus architect. It is Mahler’s best-known piece and has often been performed separately from the Symphony, for example under Leonard Bernstein for Robert Kennedy‘s 1968 funeral. (Ironically, although Bernstein did not conduct at President John F. Kennedy’s actual state funeral, two days after the assassination he conducted a nationally televised memorial broadcast featuring the New York Philharmonic in Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, the "Resurrection" Symphony. Bernstein asked that a copy of the Mahler Fifth score be laid on him in his casket.) This performance was one of great beauty and more than made up for the weaknesses in the Scherzo. Particularly lovely was the harp playing of Renee Murphy.

The finale is a rondo, a musical form in which a given melody is successively contrasted with alternate tunes. This joyous piece made a fine contrast to the Adagietto, moving right along, maintaining energy until almost the end. For seventy minutes, time indeed stood still.

Then a sad thing happened: the wind started to blow and moved the branches on the trees outside the shed. Although there was no thunder or lightning, about 5% of the audience got up to leave—in the middle of the finale of the Mahler 5!—and time no longer stood still. The concert chugged along to a glorious end, but it was not what it had been nor what it could have been. The spell had been broken.

The applause was vigorous and well-deserved. Sam and I trudged back through a light drizzle to our car and went out for dinner at a hibachi restaurant. I brought a Subway turkey sandwich home to Mrs Doc, and everyone was happy.

So what about the TMCO? For a group of 80 musicians, few of whom know each other, to come together for 7 or 8 weeks to create an ensemble of such excellence and cohesiveness is an astonishing thing. It was interesting to note that about a third of them, including all four flutes, have Oriental names, especially Korean. Perhaps Korean and Chinese immigrants will provide our next generations of orchestral musicians, just as Jews and Germans largely did a century ago.

So what about the Maestra? Her tempos were good, her conducting was clear, and she was very physical, more so than most. She did a fine job with these young musicians; any quibble I would have with her interpretation is just that.

So what about Dr Robert? I enjoyed the concert immensely and can’t wait to hear the Fifth again, although I will have to forego a Carnegie Hall performance by the Philly O in October due to a family obligation. But you can be sure that if I remain in good health, I will hear it again. And you will most likely read about it on Ricochet.