Andris Nelsons conducts Ives, Beethoven, and Strauss featuring Emanuel Ax, piano
Tanglewood
Koussevitzky Music Shed, Lenox/Stockbridge, MA
Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra
Andris Nelsons, conductor
Emanuel Ax, piano
IVES Three Places in New England
BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 3
Intermission
STRAUSS Also sprach Zarathustra
Emanuel Ax returns to Tanglewood for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3, a work of intense emotionality and complex musicality that takes the listener through light and shadow, hope and despair.
Andris Nelsons leads the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra to the stars in Strauss’ palatial Also sprach Zarathustra, and on a journey back home to New England through Ives’ textured Three Places in New England, which tells three very different stories of historic events and landmarks throughout the region.
The 2024 Leonard Bernstein Memorial Concert is supported by generous endowments established in perpetuity by Dr. Raymond and Hannah H. Schneider, and Diane H. Lupean.
Performance Details
Jul 21, 2024, 2:30pm EDT
Featuring
Program Notes & Works
Three Places in New England (Orchestral Set No. 1)
The premiere of Three Places in New England gave Ives the rare opportunity to hear a professional performance of one of his forty or so professional works, most of which lay mute in manuscript for decades.
Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Opus 37
For virtuoso performer-composers like Beethoven, concertos were designed as personal showpieces.
Also sprach Zarathustra, Tone poem for large orchestra, free after Nietzsche, Opus 30
Surely no major philosopher has ever had a closer relationship to music and musicians than Friedrich Nietzsche, and no work of philosophy has inspired more musical compositions than his best-known work, Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus spake Zarathustra).