Oliver Knussen

LENOX — This year’s Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood treated “contemporary’’ as a style more than a temporal measurement; the average age of programmed works was just about 28. Last year it was around 10. Age is relative, of course. Witness that it was the 101-year-old Elliott Carter who wrote the festival’s newest piece, a chamber-orchestra setting of Marianne Moore poetry titled, appropriately, “What Are Years.’’ Superbly sung by Sarah Joanne Davis and conducted by Oliver Knussen, the cycle’s wry conciseness and unsentimental poignancy capped a...

LENOX — This year’s Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood treated “contemporary’’ as a style more than a temporal measurement; the average age of programmed works was just about 28. Last year it was around 10. Age is relative, of course. Witness that it was the 101-year-old Elliott Carter who wrote the festival’s newest piece, a chamber-orchestra setting of Marianne Moore poetry titled, appropriately, “What Are Years.’’ Superbly sung by Sarah Joanne Davis and conducted by Oliver Knussen, the cycle’s wry conciseness and unsentimental poignancy capped a...

LENOX - Something remarkable happened this week in the Berkshires. The Tanglewood Music Center for the first time in its history devoted its Festival of Contemporary Music to the work of a single composer - Elliott Carter - in honor of his 100th birthday this December. I do not know of any living composer who has been given a tribute of this magnitude and sustained intensity. Ten concerts over five days featured 47 different works by Carter. Not a single note by anyone else was played.

LENOX - Something remarkable happened this week in the Berkshires. The Tanglewood Music Center for the first time in its history devoted its Festival of Contemporary Music to the work of a single composer - Elliott Carter - in honor of his 100th birthday this December. I do not know of any living composer who has been given a tribute of this magnitude and sustained intensity. Ten concerts over five days featured 47 different works by Carter. Not a single note by anyone else was played.

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Tuesday's Boston Symphony Orchestra concert paid tribute to every parent who ever bailed his kid out of a jam. Pianist Leon Fleisher fell victim to a stomach virus late Tuesday afternoon, putting the evening's scheduled performance of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 ("Emperor") in jeopardy. But BSO assistant conductor Julian Kuerti, making his official debut with the orchestra on these concerts, had a fallback: His dad was in town. And Anton Kuerti is one of the best interpreters of Beethoven around.

A familiar slate of guest conductors will anchor the Boston Symphony Orchestra's 2012-13 season, and Itzhak Perlman will open the season as both conductor and soloist in an all-Beethoven program on Sept. 22. These and other details of the 2012-13 season were announced today. Much of the orchestra's current 2011-12 season was already planned before music director James Levine's resignation last year, making 2012-13 the first season to be programmed from scratch without a music director.

Youth and experience shared the stage of Symphony Hall last night as Julian Kuerti made his conducting debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on a program that featured the veteran pianist Leon Fleisher performing Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto. The back stories of both musicians are compelling; the artistic results were more mixed. James Levine appointed Kuerti last year as an assistant conductor of the BSO, a position he had held with Ivan Fischer's Budapest Festival Orchestra.

Reprinted from late editions of yesterday's Globe. Youth and experience shared the stage of Symphony Hall Thursday night as Julian Kuerti made his conducting debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on a program that featured the veteran pianist Leon Fleisher performing Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto. The back stories of both musicians are compelling; the artistic results were more mixed. James Levine appointed Kuerti last year as an assistant conductor of the BSO, a position he had held with Ivan Fischer's Budapest Festival Orchestra.

The envelope, please. The prize for the season's most ravishing encore goes to Garrick Ohlsson. After the audience in Symphony Hall last night responded to the pianist's performance of Rachmaninoff's Third Concerto with something that sounded like primal scream therapy, Ohlsson obliged with Chopin's Waltz in E-flat, Op. 18. He toyed with the rhythm in a manner both free and disciplined; hitherto hidden voices sang from within the textures....

LENOX - Tanglewood is large enough that it can hold a concurrent mini-festival mostly without disturbing the rhythms of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its summertime audiences. This weekend, tucked away in the Tanglewood Theater and Ozawa Hall, ears were trained on music by living composers - and lots of it. Since Friday afternoon, the Tanglewood Music Center has been hosting its annual new-music bash, the Festival of Contemporary Music. Last summer’s festival was an anomaly in its laser-like focus on the music of a single composer, Elliott Carter, and the previous year it grappled with a...