Tanglewood: A Group Memoir

This is the story of Tanglewood - the summer home of the Boston Symphony since 1935 - as told in first-person accounts by such Tanglewood luminaries as Leonard Bernstein, Serge Koussevitzky, Aaron Copland, Erich Leinsdorf, Phyllis Curtin, Seiji Ozawa, Yo-Yo Ma, Dawn Upshaw, John Harbison, James Levine, and many of the leading musicians, critics, and music professionals who consider Tanglewood a second home.This is a ‘documentary’ coffee-table book including letters, speeches, interviews, vintage newspaper articles, and a treasure trove of photographs from the BSO’s archives, woven together by a narrative thread and commented on by the author.Among the dozens of stories included are: student Lenny Bernstein writes the folks back home about Koussie and the Boiks ; ten years later, conductor Leonard Bernstein inspires the students with his own brand of oratory; Boris Goldovsky reminisces about the glory days of the Tanglewood Opera Department where he discovered Leontyne Price, Sherrill Milnes, and an amazing number of soon-to-become-famous young American singers; Gunther Schuller’s 1979 Tanglewood manifesto is the talk of the music world; Oliver Knussen relates how Rostopovich told the Shed audience of the death of Shostakovich after conducting the composer’s Fifth Symphony; Seiji Ozawa remembers his student trip to Tanglewood on a Bonanza bus with only a few phrases of English at his command and very few dollars in his pocket; and, the transformation of Tanglewood under the orchestra’s new Music Director, James Levine.