David Noel Edwards is a writer, composer, and recording artist from Canaan, New York. He has been writing for the Berkshire Edge since 2015, mainly about music, but also about books, birds, and reptiles.
The extreme technical and emotional demands placed on performers of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 4 have a way of separating the men and women from the boys and girls.
Widely recognized as one of Britain's most important contemporary composers, Oliver Knussen began his association with Tanglewood and the Tanglewood Music Center when he was 18 years old.
The entire score of "The Firebird" is a revelation, and hearing it performed in concert is an exhilarating experience that Stravinsky aficionados always crave.
In live-to-picture productions, orchestras perform an entire movie score in real time as the film unspools. If a conductor gets out of sync with the moving picture, the show ends in catastrophe.
Franziska Huhn's harp demonstration was one of several "Summer Sundays" events taking place in various locations on the Tanglewood grounds this summer continuing through the end of August.
"Trouble in Tahiti" may not be in the same league as the enormously successful "On the Town," but it showcases the quirky, jazz-inflected melodic and harmonic writing Lenny is famous for.
The opera is famous not so much for its plot as for its melodies, which make it one of Puccini’s most accessible works and an ideal starting point for opera newbies.
Now in his 30th year of delivering Tanglewood pre-concert lectures at Lenox Library, Yudkin treated the crowd to a boatload of fascinating but little-known details about three famous pieces of music and the men who created them.
Not everyone appreciates exuberant expressivity in classical music performances, but critics in the year of Leonard Bernstein’s 100th birthday are finding it more difficult than ever to maintain even the appearance of reasoned thinking in their expressions of contempt.
Although one must be wary of the word “definitive” when describing any musical performance, overenthusiastic critics (there are a few) must be forgiven if they use such language to describe the orchestra’s widely praised Shostakovitch performances.
