Tanglewood Festival Chorus

LENOX -- Tweaking performance traditions can be a good thing, as even the most worthy rituals, when left untouched, can calcify into stale routine. In recent years, the BSO has typically performed Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to close the classical season at Tanglewood, but last summer, music director James Levine switched things up by opening the summer with the Ninth instead. This year, Levine and the BSO took a pass from the event altogether in anticipation of the orchestra's upcoming European tour.

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 banks of the Shenandoah, and climbed the...

From Gounod to Busoni to Thomas Mann, the Faust legend has captured and catalyzed many an artistic imagination. But has anyone responded to this myth with as much sheer invention and originality as did Berlioz in "The Damnation of Faust"? He labeled his own masterpiece a "dramatic legend" because it just could not be shoehorned into the pre existing categories of opera or oratorio. And so there it resides as a kind of self-enclosed genre, a lone island off the coast of the Romantic repertoire.

James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra are ringing in the new year this week not with a frothy champagne-like program but with one of the darkest, most severe — yet also most enticing — pairings of the season: Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex’’ and Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle.’’ Levine has conducted each work often over the course of his career, but never before on the same program. Judging by last night’s performance, pairing these pieces worked on many levels, if not on all of them.

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 banks of the Shenandoah, and climbed the...

LENOX — In his visit to Tanglewood this summer to replace the recovering James Levine, Michael Tilson Thomas has been swept into the full range of campus activities, working not only with the Boston Symphony Orchestra but also with the students of the Tanglewood Music Center. Both facets of his work were on view this weekend, when he deftly led the BSO Friday night in a reprise of its Stravinsky-Mozart program from this year’s Symphony Hall season, and on Saturday drew energized performances from the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra and gathered vocal forces in...

LENOX -- The James Levine era began at Tanglewood last night with rain, cold, and Mahler's Eighth Symphony. A crowd of 5,436 people braved the weather to pay their respects, listen to the music, and cheer the Boston Symphony Orchestra's new music director at the end. They cheered him at the beginning, too -- Levine, whose only previous appearance at Tanglewood was 33 years ago, was greeted with a standing ovation. The Mahler Eighth has been nicknamed the "Symphony of a Thousand" because of the huge forces required to perform it. Levine made do with 361 musicians, but...

Reprinted from late editions of yesterday’s Globe. The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s complete cycle of Beethoven symphonies has entered its home stretch, as Thursday night the BSO unveiled the fourth and final program of the series, featuring the Eighth and Ninth Symphonies. Any performance of the Ninth by a world-class orchestra and an excellent chorus in an acoustically superior hall is by definition an event, no matter who is at the podium. In this case, Lorin Maazel was conducting, filling in for James Levine, who is still recovering from back surgery.

James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra are ringing in the new year this week not with a frothy champagne-like program but with one of the darkest, most severe — yet also most enticing — pairings of the season: Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex’’ and Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle.’’ Levine has conducted each work often over the course of his career, but never before on the same program. Judging by last night’s performance, pairing these pieces worked on many levels, if not on all of them.

Having missed most of the Tanglewood season because of surgery to remove what proved to be a cancerous tumor, James Levine returned to conducting earlier this month at the Metropolitan Opera, leading a performance of the Verdi Requiem in memory of Luciano Pavarotti. On Friday he conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Brahms's "German Requiem," the second program of the orchestra's season. The confluence of these two revered memorial works so close to his own life-changing event was eerie.

James Levine’s return to active leadership at the Boston Symphony Orchestra was ratified last night at the season’s opening subscription performance in Symphony Hall. For the first time this season, the conductor entered from the wings carrying a cane, which upon reaching the podium he neatly leaned against the railing. Then, as if to suggest how little his manner of entrance mattered, he proceeded to unfurl a magisterially paced, sweeping performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony.

LENOX — Every year in late August, like ripe local tomatoes, cool New England nights, or spontaneous bouts of anticipatory dread, the ringing sounds of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at Tanglewood signal what everyone knows, but is still hoping might not quite yet be the case: Summer has run its course. The Boston Symphony Orchestra concluded its Tanglewood season on Sunday with a performance of the Ninth, as it does every year. Some summers, the ritual can feel tired, so much so that I’ve often wondered whether audiences, the orchestra, and the music...

LENOX — In his visit to Tanglewood this summer to replace the recovering James Levine, Michael Tilson Thomas has been swept into the full range of campus activities, working not only with the Boston Symphony Orchestra but also with the students of the Tanglewood Music Center. Both facets of his work were on view this weekend, when he deftly led the BSO Friday night in a reprise of its Stravinsky-Mozart program from this year’s Symphony Hall season, and on Saturday drew energized performances from the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra and gathered vocal forces in Mahler’s...

Reprinted from late editions of yesterday’s Globe. The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s complete cycle of Beethoven symphonies has entered its home stretch, as Thursday night the BSO unveiled the fourth and final program of the series, featuring the Eighth and Ninth Symphonies. Any performance of the Ninth by a world-class orchestra and an excellent chorus in an acoustically superior hall is by definition an event, no matter who is at the podium. In this case, Lorin Maazel was conducting, filling in for James Levine, who is still recovering from back...

LENOX - How much rain does it take to obliterate a viola solo? It sounds like the set-up to a bad viola joke, that cruel subgenre of orchestral comedy targeting the most harassed of string instruments. But it became a legitimate question Friday night at Tanglewood, as James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra were forced to pause between movements of Berlioz’s “Harold in Italy.’’ The downpour had become so severe that the solo efforts of BSO principal viola Steven Ansell were almost inaudible, as was much of the orchestral playing that fell beneath a mezzo-forte.

Having missed most of the Tanglewood season because of surgery to remove what proved to be a cancerous tumor, James Levine returned to conducting earlier this month at the Metropolitan Opera, leading a performance of the Verdi Requiem in memory of Luciano Pavarotti. On Friday he conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Brahms's "German Requiem," the second program of the orchestra's season. The confluence of these two revered memorial works so close to his own life-changing event was eerie.

James Levine’s return to active leadership at the Boston Symphony Orchestra was ratified last night at the season’s opening subscription performance in Symphony Hall. For the first time this season, the conductor entered from the wings carrying a cane, which upon reaching the podium he neatly leaned against the railing. Then, as if to suggest how little his manner of entrance mattered, he proceeded to unfurl a magisterially paced, sweeping performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony.

LENOX -- Tweaking performance traditions can be a good thing, as even the most worthy rituals, when left untouched, can calcify into stale routine. In recent years, the BSO has typically performed Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to close the classical season at Tanglewood, but last summer, music director James Levine switched things up by opening the summer with the Ninth instead. This year, Levine and the BSO took a pass from the event altogether in anticipation of the orchestra's upcoming European tour.