August 4, 2001 performance reviewed by Dave Conlin Read
Current Tanglewood schedule and ticket info.
For his Tanglewood swan song, Seiji Ozawa chose to conduct Richard Strauss’ “Salome, Opus 54,” performed without staging and costumes – no dancing the Dance of the Seven Veils. No matter; Strauss’ music and Oscar Wilde’s poetry, brought to life by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and an impressive cast led by Deborah Voigt, were more than enough to elicit an eruption of applause that lasted well after Maestro Ozawa had scurried off the stage of the Kousevitsky Shed for the last time as BSO music director.
This was an hour and three-quarters of incomparable aural beauty; a sonic statue sculpted by Ozawa. Whenever anyone present muses on the Maestro’s Tanglewood tenure, it will reverberate in memory, as Haiku does.
In stead of a set full of scenery and costumes for the singers, they stood on a platform behind the orchestra. The opera’s literary and artistic antecedents include the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, a short story by Gustave Flaubert (“Herodias”), and a panoply of paintings, including one by Gustave Moreau that inspired Oscar Wilde.
With only minimal dramatic action to follow on stage, one was free to focus on Oscar Wilde’s poetry via the supertitles. For example: As soon as Salome’s entreaty to Jokanaan,
is thus rebuffed by Jokanaan:
Salome revises her opinion on his body and shifts her attention to his hair:
It is of thy hair that I am enamored, Jokanaan. Thy hair is like clusters of grapes… The long black nights, when the moon hides her face, when the stars are afraid, are not so black as thy hair.
Left on the page, such language may look overblown, if descriptive and colorful. Its magic lays in the rhythm, the repartee of the dialogues, the contradictions and emotional swings. In performance, it allows the singers to display the full range of their gifts, as the score does the orchestra. What better choice than Salome as Ozawa’s swan song to Tanglewood?
It is delicious to speculate on the similies Wilde would draw if he were to describe Ms. Voigt’s performance. She was a commanding and brilliant presence; her performance was a masterpiece, rich as a Michelangelo.
This was Seiji Ozawa’s good bye to his beloved Tanglewood, delivered with the full vocabulary of music. He spoke no words to the audience – which would have been as silly as shining neon lights on the Sistene Chapel.







Sonny Rollins at Tanglewood Jazz Festival
September 2, 2001 performance, reviewed by Dave Conlin Read
Current Tanglewood schedule and ticket info.
Coursing through a dozen compositions in two sets, the eloquent, elegant, and limber Rollins and his five-piece band gave a performance that shone with a singular brilliance, but probably would have had many matches in the decades when giants of bebop roamed the planet by the dozens.
During his band-mates’ solos, he may sidle over by the piano, snapping time with his fingers, or stand head bowed and motionless, facing in the same direction as the audience. All the while a world of emotion emanates from the stage, uttered by six individuals in language that is both sacred and profane, terse and wordy, crisp and chewy.
Rollins longest introduction was for Global Warming (from the 1998 Milestone recording of the same name). Saying it came from “the stupid mind of a musician who thought that we were despoiling the water” and mentioning the horrors of being in L.A. in the daytime and not being able to get a good tomato that wasn’t full of chemicals, he seemed dismissive of the composition’s impetus, ending by saying, “but hey, that’s politics.”
Whether or not art and politics make good bedfellows, politicians (and their enablers) would benefit by a daily dose of this composition, which is driven by the kind of infectious rhythm that makes you want to get up and bop around; not dance, but become one with the music as it rises and falls – just be – just bop. It makes you feel good, and it makes you want to communicate with those near you, maybe not with words, maybe not in an intimate nor a profound manner, just with cheerfulness and joy.
Sonny Rollins’s band: Clifton Anderson on trombone, Stephen Scott on piano, Bob Cranshaw on electric bass, Perry Wilson on drums, Victor See Yuen on African percussion.