Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music: Old Copland, New Carter, and Others

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Monday August 16, 2010 at Ozawa Hall
“Aureoles” (1979) by Jacob Druckman
Conductor – Keitaro Harada
“Turning Point” (2006, American premiere) by Colin Matthews
Conductor – Cristian Macelaru
“What Are Years” by Elliott Carter (2010, American premiere)
Songs for soprano and chamber orchestra on poems of Marianne Moore
Soprano – Sarah Joanne Davis
Conductor – Oliver Knussen
“Third Symphony” (1946) by Aaron Copland
Conductor – Robert Spano

Varieties of modern orchestral experience, British and American, were on display at the concluding event of this summer's Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood, with three out of four offerings featuring the full (or over-full) resources of large ensembles. The Carter song-cycle used the pared-down configuration of a good-sized chamber-orchestra to support the solo soprano. Each work inhabited a distinctive sound-world and had its own conductor; it was almost as if we were hearing four different orchestras. It would be neat if I could diagram the four pieces as the points on a musical compass, but the chronological distance between the Copland (1946) and the rest (1982-2010) was such that the picture would look more like a buried root system connected to the leafy ends of three branches, and not all even belonging to the same tree. (Freud said that you are bound to run into problems if you try to construct a physical model of the mind; I'm having the same problem with this set of pieces.) But one implicit subtext may have inadvertently bound three of the four works together, that of war and peace.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review for the Arts!

Michael Miller