Tanglewood

Scampo chef Lydia Shire is Tanglewood bound. The Boston Symphony Orchestra announced yesterday that Shire will be the first chef to design a special menu for the Tanglewood Opening Night Gala Dinner on July 8. We’ve seen that menu, which is influenced by the BSO’s all-Italian program, and it includes duck, lamb chops, tuna, and melon shots — served separately, of course.

The Tanglewood Festival Chorus is receiving more than its usual workout during these final weeks of the Boston Symphony Orchestra's subscription season. Having only recently sung Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis" in Boston and New York, the members of the chorus are back on the stage of Symphony Hall this week with Brahms's "German Requiem. " Soon they will return for Stravinsky's "Symphony of Psalms" and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Even in such august company, the Brahms requiem tends to stand on its own island of tone, meaning, and content.

Chef Lydia Shire was at Tanglewood over the weekend to cook a themed meal for the Opening Night Gala. Shire’s dishes were Italian-inspired to match the night’s program of Italian works. Joining her for the party were gala cochairs Susie and Stuart Hirshfield , Robin Richman , and Bruce Auerbach , and BSO managing director Mark Volpe . Also at the event were BSO supporter Kim Taylor ( James Taylor ’s wife) and her niece Anne Campbell .

New relationships form quickly these days at Symphony Hall. The French conductor Stephane Deneve made his Boston Symphony Orchestra debut less than a year ago, filling in for an ailing Sir Colin Davis, and he is back already this week. He will also lead the orchestra in Carnegie Hall next month and will make additional appearances at Tanglewood, leading a Saturday night program with Yo-Yo Ma and participating in the orchestra's annual Tanglewood on Parade gala concert. Given how quickly this season was recast after James Levine's resignation, one can't read too much...

The San Francisco treat known as Train made its Tanglewood debut this week, playing a couple of tunes with the groovy BSO chamber ensemble known as the Boston Cello Quartet. The cellists opened with their own arrangements of Train's "Parachute" and "Marry Me," and then singer Pat Monahan and his bandmates, best known for songs such as "Calling All Angels" and "Hey, Soul Sister," joined in for a few numbers.

LENOX - If it had been any other band, the opening stretch of Wilco's much-anticipated show at Tanglewood on Tuesday would have seemed insanely temperate. Who greets a pumped, rabid crowd with a laid-back soft-rocker ("Either Way"), a gentle pop tune ("Hummingbird"), and a winsome country-folk song ("Remember the Mountain Bed")? Wilco does - precisely because the band has built a relationship of uncommon trust with its audience. Intensity and noise would materialize, in a pitch-perfect tangle of earthy comforts and perilous adventure, during a stellar...

LENOX - There was a 10-foot-tall Trojan horse perched on a hill overlooking the Tanglewood grounds this weekend, but it was only for ceremony, hardly big enough to hold more than one or two orchestra members inside. Berlioz's epic opera "The Trojans" was the real vehicle out of which the Boston Symphony Orchestra stormed this weekend, launching the summer Tanglewood season with a rousing two-part performance of this truly grand 19th-century opera. It is in fact hard to think of an opera that paints on a vaster canvas than Berlioz's valedictory masterpiece, completed in 1858...

LENOX -- One day, four concerts, two of chamber music, two orchestral programs -- business as usual at Tanglewood on a gorgeous Sunday. In the afternoon, the bearded Scottish conductor Donald Runnicles was with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the Shed. Runnicles is a busy man in this country these days, as music director of the San Francisco Opera, principal conductor of the Orchestra of St. Luke's, principal guest conductor of the Atlanta Symphony, among others. He has an invigorating musical personality, and he's fun to watch in part because he's a lefty...

BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA At: Tanglewood (Friday night and Saturday night) LENOX - It was only the second weekend of the Boston Symphony Orchestra's season at Tanglewood, but the place was already running on a relaxed summer cruise control. Stalwart veterans and younger musicians each had a night in front of the orchestra. Both programs were built around a well-known symphony and a major Romantic concerto. Soloists kept the flame on medium heat. The biggest buzz was about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was spotted in the Shed on Friday night, and the weather, which...

After taking the unusual step of incorporating a medieval vocal ensemble into last week's program, the Boston Symphony Orchestra returned to the comfort of the familiar last night in Symphony Hall. This week's program seems eager to please, with two popular masterworks - Dvorak's Cello Concerto and Beethoven's "Pastoral" Symphony. It's the kind of combination one finds often at Tanglewood, and in fact, both works were recently performed there, the Beethoven in July and the Dvorak the previous summer.

> My neighbor frequently asks my wife and me to watch his dog when he travels. We like the dog and had fun watching it the first couple of times, but the task is starting to get old because we do it every other month. Also, the neighbor has a list of instructions that include scheduled feedings and playtimes. He pushes to know our weekend schedules, often saying, "Let me know as soon as possible, so I can make my arrangements. " I want to remain neighborly, but we are getting tired of this responsibility.

BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Christoph von Dohnanyi, conductor At: Tanglewood (last night) LENOX - This season at Tanglewood has brought its fair share of grand musical gestures, with Berlioz's Requiem and the vast symphonies of Mahler thundering from the stage of the Koussevitzky Music Shed. By the year 1905, Arnold Schoenberg was tired of music of this scale. Not listening to it, he once recalled, but writing it, or at least of being a composer who accepted this as his inheritance and mandate.

BSO; TANGLEWOOD MUSIC CENTER ORCHESTRA; AX, MA, AND MCGILL At: Tanglewood, Friday-Sunday LENOX - Most summers at Tanglewood the music of Brahms is performed frequently enough to seem like a fixture of the landscape, and there it was once more this past weekend, the intimate thunder of the symphonies and choral music resounding in the Koussevitzky Music Shed. The music's ubiquity can breed a sense of routine but not on Sunday, when the fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center rallied for a potent last hurrah.

HANDEL: Orlando Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra Nicholas McGegan, conductor At: Seiji Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood. Tuesday, 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $18-$52. www.bso.org In the early 1980s, director Peter Sellars and conductor Craig Smith collaborated on a production of Handel's "Orlando" that set the opera at the Kennedy Space Center and on Mars. It was a landmark - not only in the resurgence of interest in Handel operas, which has come full flower in recent years, but in Boston's development into a place of almost...

STEPHANIE BLYTHE AND FRIENDS At: Seiji Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood, Wednesday With a little help from some friends, mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe treated a receptive Ozawa Hall audience on Wednesday evening to a nourishing program celebrating homespun American values: community, simplicity, gratitude. Pianist/composer Alan Louis Smith, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Tanglewood Music Center fellows and guests joined Blythe on a nostalgic musical and spiritual journey that traversed the Great Plains, descended to the...

The San Francisco treat known as Train made its Tanglewood debut this week, playing a couple of tunes with the groovy BSO chamber ensemble known as the Boston Cello Quartet. The cellists opened with their own arrangements of Train's "Parachute" and "Marry Me," and then singer Pat Monahan and his bandmates, best known for songs such as "Calling All Angels" and "Hey, Soul Sister," joined in for a few numbers.

LENOX — It’s hard to imagine a more serene and sensual combination of elements for a summer evening: a temperature in the low 70s, a rosy sunset, members of the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, the open-ended ambience of Ozawa Hall, and Johannes Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet in B minor. At times on Wednesday evening, it was hard to tell whether you were feeling a breeze on your skin or hearing a rising phrase on William Hudgins’s clarinet. In their first program at Tanglewood this summer, the first-chair players of the Boston Symphony chose pieces by Classical, Romantic, Latin American, and...

PORGY AND BESS Presented by the Boston Symphony Orchestra At: Tanglewood, Lenox, Aug. 26. Tickets: $9-$91. 617-266-1200, www.bso.org While the American Repertory Theater prepares to open its musical-theater version of George Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" in Cambridge, the Boston Symphony Orchestra is getting ready for its own semi-staged concert performance at Tanglewood on Aug. 26 under Bramwell Tovey. It might seem the productions were planned to complement each other, but in fact the timing is "absolutely coincidence," according to Anthony Fogg, the BSO's artistic...

FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC Charles Wuorinen, director At: Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood (Wednesday and last night) LENOX - Every summer at Tanglewood, for a few enticing days, the fringes become the center and an adventurous audience convenes in Ozawa Hall for the Festival of Contemporary Music. This year's festival is being directed by the composer Charles Wuorinen, often grouped with high-modernism's old guard. But the programs are at least somewhat generationally and stylistically diverse.