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Tanglewood Music Center fellows pull off Verdi’s Don Carlo Posted by Sam on August 8, 2007, 8:01 pm 151.203.150.249 Last Saturday evening in Lenox, Massachusetts, I had the privilege of hearing the fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center perform Verdi’s Don Carlo. It was refreshing to hear music of this complexity played with the prowess of a top-rate professional orchestra – and these musicians still had full heads of hair. James Levine, who has probably conducted the opera about seventy five times (at the Met and at opera houses all over the world) led the TMC orchestra, composed of young players, for whom this piece was an entirely new endeavor. While it is magnificent to hear the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra (James Levine’s regular gig) play Don Carlo, it was even more powerful to hear these young people, most of who are in their mid twenties, play with all the sensitivity and insight that Verdi requires. It is a complicated work, more so than Rigoletto or La Traviata, which are much less faceted than Don Carlo. According to the students, only a handful of them were familiar with the opera before rehearsals began. It is all too often that young musicians are required to play pieces of this magnitude and difficulty without being afforded the time or the opportunity to grasp the context of the piece and understand the plot in a way that makes the performance all the more convincing. To call the weekly schedule of a TMC fellow a busy one would be trivializing. Each musician is given a schedule twice during the summer, totaling more than three hundred pages of musical activity. Somehow amid the master classes, orchestra and chamber rehearsals, lessons and concerts, they have also attended classes on Don Carlo, to better understand its plot, historical context, and political implications. They had nearly a dozen rehearsals to put the work together, many more than the Met Opera is given. Judging from the polished performance they gave, and their understanding of Levine’s interpretation, they must have retained a great deal of the work they did in rehearsal. Sadly, this is not the way all orchestras function. I have attended open rehearsals of other professional orchestras in which the conductor makes a suggestion that is ignored in the performance. While the music may have been new to many of the fellows, they were still visually and audibly aware of what was going on in the opera as they played. Their music making reflected and supported the libretto with a degree of sensitivity for which any opera orchestra could aim. In the opening of the second act, in which Don Carlo meets Princess Eboli in the garden at midnight, each orchestra player moved and listened to the others as sensitively as they do in their weekly chamber concerts. The fact that their daily schedules include master classes on solo repertoire, and chamber rehearsals, in addition to orchestra rehearsals, makes for well-rounded musicians. James Levine has pushed for just this crossover of musical experiences, arguing that a musician can only play romantic orchestral works successfully if he is also familiar with playing opera, and a successful solo performance is only made possible through experience in playing chamber music. Equally impressive to the performance was browsing the rest of the TMC’s season schedule (bso.org or tanglewood.org). The amount of versatility the programming requires of the fellows is mind-boggling. The Verdi performance ended after 11:00 pm, and at 10:00 am the next morning, the TMC kicked off its weeklong Festival of Contemporary Music, with a chamber concert featuring the music of Borden, Zwilich, Eckhardt and Sollberger. In addition to weekly Sunday morning chamber music concerts, the TMC still has four fully staged upcoming performances of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte, a performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with Rafael Frübeck de Burgos and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, as well as several other concerts featuring the works of composition fellows and opera scenes with the vocal fellows. If you are able to, you should make it to hear the TMC fellows before their season is over, if for no other reason, so that when they become the most celebrated orchestral players and soloists of tomorrow, you can say you heard them back when they were fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center.  Post a Response

Re: Tanglewood Music Center fellows pull off Verdi’s Don Carlo Posted by Bill Kenny on August 9, 2007, 3:46 pm, in reply to "Tanglewood Music Center fellows pull off Verdi’s Don Carlo" 88.97.8.139 Thanks, Sam for this detailed and enthusiastic recommendation. I am happy to be able to report that in addition to the two Tanglewood reviews from Clay Andres recently published in 'Seen and Heard', we should have another fairly soon on a concert or recital from the remainder of the the programme for this year's TMC fellows. As you rightly say, there is a distinct and particular pleasure in being able to recall the earliest professional performances of musicians who become household names later in their careers.  Post a Response

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