Boston Symphony Announces 2024 Tanglewood Season

Tanglewood–the famed music and learning campus and summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, situated in the beautiful Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts–has announced details of its 2024 season, opening in late June through August 31. The fabled concert retreat was seen prominently in the recent released biopic "Maestro" about Leonard Bernstein, who made his mark there during his long association with the BSO.

For more information, visit the Boston Symphony Orchestra website.

The 2024 Tanglewood season will feature more than 100 performances, including eleven weeks of concerts and other events by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Boston Pops, Tanglewood Music Center, and Tanglewood Learning Institute; chamber music, recital, and concert opera presentations in Ozawa Hall; and a series of Popular Artist concerts, highlighted this summer by the 50th-anniversary performance of James Taylor and his All-Star Band in the Koussevitzky Music Shed on July 3 and 4. In some of the most eagerly anticipated events of the 2024 Tanglewood season, BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons will lead ten programs and two master classes in his new expanded role as Head of Conducting at Tanglewood including a weekend of programs celebrating the legacy of Serge Koussevitzky (July 26-28).

The BSO's July 5 Opening Night all-Beethoven program with violin virtuoso Hilary Hahn launches a season that will shine a spotlight on a wide spectrum of musical guests and the festival's rich tradition of presenting summertime concerts at their best since 1937. Other Opening Weekend concerts feature Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops performing favorites from Broadway today on July 6, and Nelsons leading soprano Renée Fleming in an all-Strauss program on July 7. Taken together, they set the stage for a summer exploring a unique breadth of music and related programming, as well as an extraordinary roster of the leading artists of our day, including Emanuel Ax, Joshua Bell (marking his 35th consecutive summer at Tanglewood), Yefim Bronfman, Leonidas Kavakos, Paul Lewis, Yo-Yo Ma, Midori, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Yuja Wang, and John Williams, among many others.

Celebrating Koussevitzky

In observance of the 150th birth anniversary of Russian-born conductor, composer, and double bassist Sergei Koussevitzky (1874–1951) and the 100 years since his appointment as the BSO's pioneering music director, the BSO performs music he either composed, premiered, championed, or commissioned on the weekend of his actual birthday, July 26. As the BSO's ninth conductor and the first to hold the title of Music Director, Koussevitzky conducted his first concerts in the Berkshires in 1936 and founded the Berkshire Music Center (later to be named Tanglewood Music Center) in 1940, creating a premier music academy where talented young professional musicians could access the resources of a great symphony orchestra, honing their skills under the mentorship of BSO musicians and other luminaries in the field. TMC alumni include Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, Michael Tilson Thomas, Mario Lanza, Wynton Marsalis, Burt Bacharach, Dawn Upshaw, Leontyne Price, and Phyllis Curtin, as well as more than 40 current BSO musicians.

Andris Nelsons' Additional Programs

In addition to the two Opening Weekend concerts and the three Koussevitzky 150 programs described above, Andris Nelsons will lead four other BSO programs in July. In one of several collaborations this summer with other performing arts institutions, the BSO partners with Boston Ballet for a July 12 concert that pairs Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade with Stravinsky's neoclassical ballet Apollon Musagète. Accompanying the BSO on the Shed stage for the Stravinsky are members of Boston Ballet, led by artistic director Mikko Nissinen, who will dance the original choreography created by the 24-year-old George Balanchine for the 1928 premiere. Later that same weekend, on July 13, piano sensation Yuja Wang joins the BSO (concerto to be announced later), followed on July 14 by violinist Augustin Hadelich in Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto, complementing a program of music by contemporary American composer Sarah Kirkland Snider and Dvořák.

In another major festival moment, and reaffirming Mr. Nelsons' commitment to an opera presentation each season at the Shed, is a concert performance of Act III of Wagner's Götterdämmerung on July 20. Soprano Christine Goerke headlines an all-star cast as Brünnhilde with Swedish tenor Michael Weinius as Siegfried (in his BSO debut), soprano Amanda Majeski as Gutrune, baritone James Rutherford as Gunther, and bass Morris Robinson as Hagen.

Nelsons will also conduct two Shed concerts with the Tanglewood Music Center Conducting Fellows and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra. The first will include Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 on July 8, and the second will feature Emanuel Ax performing Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3 along with works by Ives and Strauss on July 21.