The Special Magic of Tanglewood — Ignat Solzhenitsyn

The Special Magic of Tanglewood

the gentle hordes gather

Here we are at Labor Day, and I’d like to say that I’m refreshed and ready for the new season:  but in reality I feel barely decompressed from a most eventful and fulfilling summer.  In addition to the Marlboro Festival, where I spent five weeks—as I do every other year—I spent a portion of my summer on the chamber-music faculty at the Tanglewood Music Center.   As I touch upon briefly here, I came away exceedingly impressed with the top standard of artistic integrity that Tanglewood somehow manages to combine with an unashamedly wide appeal to mass audiences.  In fact, a significant part of Tanglewood’s enduring success during its first seventy-five years lies in its felicitous, if sometimes unexpected, juxtapositions:  one of the world’s great professional orchestras, with a storied continuity of tradition—and an all-star student orchestra that comes together at the beginning of the summer, attaining a superb level by the end; a beehive of gnarly elite creativity, including the renowned Festival of Contemporary Music—and relaxed outdoor concerts by James Taylor or Diana Krall; a major nerve-center of the classical world (conductors, soloists, composers, administrators, managers, critics)—and a rural location in the Berkshire hills; a natural setting of grandeur and magisterial insouciance—and the ever-present threat of torrential rain or tornadoes.  And perhaps the most striking contrast of all:  the petulant hand-wringing about the supposed End of Times so prevalent amongst many in our field—and its living repudiation in the dynamic whirlwind of this remarkable festival.