During the pause Levine got some audience laughs by looking upward and making a dramatic gesture toward the heavens - half beseeching, half conducting. But his call for meteorological decorum seemed to work, more or less, and the rain subsided at least enough for the BSO to get through the remainder of the piece.
Ansell soldiered on gamely, though one simply could not hear well enough to fairly judge the performance. Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,’’ the other big work that night, got a rousing but fairly ragged rendition, with some uncentered brass intonation and some blatant percussion disunity in the closing “Great Gate of Kiev.’’
Friday’s program, filled out with overtures by Berlioz and Mussorgsky, seemed symmetrical on paper but also slightly arbitrary. One goal was probably the preserving of rehearsal time for Saturday night’s main event, a return to Brahms’s massive “German Requiem,’’ which received a moving performance of real eloquence and depth. The piece was a greatest hit of last season, with the successful Symphony Hall concerts put out on disc as one of the debut releases on the BSO’s new label.
From the tender opening bars of the first movement, Levine’s account on Saturday was well-paced, balanced, and expansive, with the orchestra conveying just the right sense of radiant calm. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus put its massive numbers to potent expressive ends, singing with thunderous force in the climaxes of the fifth movement, and conjuring a hushed delicacy of tone when called for. As vocal soloists, soprano Hei-Kyung Hong brought a welcome warmth and lightness of phrasing and Matthias Goerne sang with a grave intensity of purpose and a shapely, sweet-toned baritone, swaying onstage like an oak in a storm.
Sunday afternoon the conductor David Robertson was on hand with an intelligently curated program of mid-century American music. Specifically, vocal works by Virgil Thomson and Samuel Barber were framed with a pair of symphonies - by Roy Harris and Leonard Bernstein - both premiered by the BSO under Koussevitzky. If only more Tanglewood programs displayed this level of forethought.
