The age factor was partially thematic. Knussen, John Harbison, and Gunther Schuller, the festival codirectors, celebrated the Tanglewood Music Center’s 70th anniversary, showcasing teachers (and a couple of students) from as far back as inaugural faculty member Paul Hindemith. But much of the programming also exemplified the heyday of an American new-music industry that sprouted in the 1960s and ’70s — and peaked, perhaps, somewhere around 28 years ago — parallel to the classical-music establishment, allied with academia, and nurtured by foundation support.
One of the most venerable festival supporters remains the Fromm Foundation, and no fewer than six of this year’s works were originally Fromm commissions. Most of those leavened atonal vocabularies with anything-goes aesthetics. Luciano Berio’s 1960 “Circles,’’ for example, further deconstructs E.E. Cummings’s deconstructed language into pure sound. (Mezzo-soprano Laura Mercado-Wright was phenomenal, the technical and theatrical demands met with a shimmering tone.) Or Lukas Foss’s 1963 “Echoi,’’ pushing 50 and still the festival’s most gleefully startling thing: a dexterously engineered free-for-all, part virtuosic showcase, part performance art. The fearlessly accomplished performers — clarinetist Ryan Yuré, percussionist Michael Roberts, cellist Kathryn Bates Williams, and pianist Nolan Pearson — threw in rock ’n’ roll wardrobe flourishes of sunglasses, Doc Martens, and No Wave red-tie-on-black, reiterating Foss’s unbridled proto-punk invention.
Another running subplot was the heterogeneity of the 12-tone method, from the finely drawn lyricism of Irving Fine’s 1959 “Fantasia for String Trio’’ to the stop-motion jazziness of Charles Wuorinen’s 2002 two-piano “Fifty Fifty.’’ Some works seemed to have been waiting for performers to catch up: Pianist Alexander Bernstein’s realization of the high-proof expressionism of Roger Sessions’s 1975 “Five Pieces’’ exploded with pent-up flair and passion.
