Through all the far-flung triumphs of Leonard Bernstein`s fabled career, the Tanglewood Festival, in his native Massachusetts, remained his spiritual home, and he, in turn, was the festival`s signal musician.
In 1940, just six years after its modest origins and two years after the Music Shed was built, Bernstein enrolled in the first class of the Berkshire
(now Tanglewood) Music Center to study conducting with Serge Koussevitzky, who was the music director of the Boston Symphony and the guiding spirit of the festival`s early years. Bernstein maintained a close working relationship with Tanglewood throughout his career.
Seiji Ozawa, who studied at the Berkshire Music Center, too, got an early career boost from Bernstein and is now the Boston Symphony`s music director, appropriately chose to dedicate the opening weekend of this year`s festival to Bernstein`s memory. Ozawa opened both the mini-festival and the Tanglewood season last weekend, leading the Boston Symphony and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus (which Bernstein conducted at its first concert in 1970) in Mahler`s Symphony No. 2, the ”Resurrection.”
He could not have picked a more evocative work. Bernstein, who played a major role in the Mahler revival of the 1960s and `70s, seems to have identified more closely with this symphony than with any other.
Ozawa has made the work something of a specialty as well.
To a listener who has heard little of the Boston Symphony in recent years, amid alarming reports of a decline in its standard, the overall excellence of the playing came as a relief. Moreover, in its quick and easy response to Ozawa`s detailed demands, the performance was thrilling. The strings were warm but remarkably lithe. Despite an occasional sour phrase in the winds, chords were marvelously weighted and balanced, and the orchestral texture showed a rare transparency.
Jessye Norman`s rich but careful rendering of the mezzo-soprano solos in the ”Urlicht” movement and the finale meshed well with Ozawa`s manicured conception. John Oliver`s superbly prepared chorus stormed the heavens with a clamor that would surely have pleased Bernstein, as no doubt, would Ozawa`s performance.
