Serge and Olga Koussevitsky Memorial Concert

The Serge and Olga Koussevitsky Memorial Concert, Sunday August 15, was a nice bit of programming, with one piece by a living composer who was present to take a bow on his 70th birthday, another by an American composer dead nearly a century, and, after intermission, a selection familiar even to those who don't listen to classical music, Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker (Act II).

Becket resident Bernard Rand's "...body and shadow..." was commissioned by the B.S.O. and Boston University to commemorate BU's 150th in 1989. Today's performance, the B.S.O.'s first since Seiji Ozawa conducted the premiere in February 1989, was part of the 2004 Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood, which is under the direction of today's conductor, Robert Spano.

Rand, a visiting faculty member of the Tanglewood Music Center, who emigrated from England in 1975, took the title from a poem of Samuel Beckett's called "What would I do without this world?"

           what would I do without this world faceless incurious
           where to be lasts but an instant where every instant
           spills in the void the ignorance of having been
           without this wave where in the end
           body and shadow together are engulfed
           what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die
           the pantings the frenzies towards succour towards love
           without this sky that soars
           above its ballast dust
        

A resident of Boston at the time of it's premiere, Rand said that, even though "...body and shadow..." is in two movements, it is a kind of concerto for "my hometown orchestra" and indicated that parts were written for personal friends in the B.S.O.

Regardless of how one reads Beckett's poetry, today's performance of "...body and shadow..." got one interested immediately with tympani bursts. Our impression of the whole piece was that it described, in the first movement, the careful, deliberate constuction of an edifice (after blasting an opening for its foundation) and the second movement seemed to describe the environment defined by the new edifice (or, the space displaced by the new edifice).

Metaphorics aside, it was an engaging and satisfying piece that was well-received by the unfortunately sparse audience, which applauded the composer warmly when Maestro Spano welcomed him to the podium.

Frequent B.S.O. and Tanglewood guest Andre Watts next performed Edward MacDowell's Piano Concerto No. 2 in D minor, a piece he has played twice before at Tanglewood, in 1976 and 1996.

Watts, whose career was given a huge boost at age 16 when Leonard Bernstein first gave him his debut with the New York Philharmonic on a nationwide broadcast of Bernstein's Young People's Concerts and then, two weeks later, asked him to substitute at the last minute for Glenn Gould in Franz Liszt's E-flat piano concerto with the Philoharmonic.

Edward MacDowell (1860-1908), once known as the "greatest American composer," and the first classical music composer honored by the United States with a postage stamp (in 1920), did much of his work in Germany, studying with Jochim Raff, who was the longtime assistant and friend of Franz Lizst.

So this is a concerto of spectacular Lizstian proportions, and on a splendid sunny Berkshire afternoon, Mr. Watts gave a performance that was scintillating throughout and exhilirating in the climax.

We were unable to attend the second half of today's concert and thereby missed the opportunity to enjoy a rare midsummer performance of Tchaikovsky's always-entertaining music from The Nutcracker.