Tanglewood Music Center

The Tanglewood Music Center , originally the Berkshire Music Center , the Berkshire Music Center, is an annual summer music school operating since 1940 at Tanglewood Manor near Lenox , Massachusetts , in the Berkshire Hills area .

The Tanglewood Manor, which got its name due to the fact that it was here that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote his “Tanglewood Tales” (a collection of Greek myths for children) in 1853 , became the venue for summer concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1936 . In 1938 , for these concerts, a 5100-seat open-air hall was specially built, and in 1940 , Sergey Kusevitsky , who was then the head of the orchestra, opened a summer course here for almost 300 young musicians. As musicologist Joseph Horowitz notes,

After World War II, Time magazine published an article about Tanglewood, in which a reporter talked to Kusevitsky and compared Tanglewood to Salzburg , and Kusevitsky was angry with this comparison. Of course, the festival in Salzburg was the most prestigious in those years in the world. But Kusevitsky replied that Tanglewood is much more important than Salzburg. He believed that the comparison was absolutely wrong. It is an example of American naivety: to demonstrate the importance of Tanglewood, they needed to compare it with something European. Kusevitsky said that Salzburg is for snobs, but Tanglewood is definitely not for snobs, this is a purely American phenomenon, reflecting the desire to democratize high culture and create real American classical music ^[1] .

Seiji Ozawa Concert Hall

Subsequently, the general management of the center was carried out, for the most part, by the artistic directors of the Boston Symphony, including Charles Munch , Erich Linesdorf , Seiji Ozawa . At the same time, Leonard Bernstein , Franco Ferrara , Gunther Schuller , Leon Fleischer , who worked here from year to year, played a large role in shaping the program and the educational process. In addition to the open concert venue, renovated in 1959 and named after Sergey Kusevitsky in 1988 , an indoor concert hall was built in 1994 , which was named after Ozawa.

Among the musicians who attended master classes at the Tanglewood Music Center at various times, there are such outstanding figures as Claudio Abbado , Don Upshaw , Luciano Berio , Michael Gandolfi , Eleazar de Carvalho , Lorin Maazel , Zubin Meta , Ned Rohrem , Michael Tilson Thomas , Alan Hovaness et al.