“This is how classical music was meant to be experienced,” my concert-mate declared as the Boston Symphony Orchestra began to play Saturday night at its summer home of Tanglewood, adding that it was even better “experienced horizontally.” He was right. Laying flat on a perfect patch of grass and gazing up at the sky, I heard Brahms as I’d never heard him before.
The clouds were shifting in those churning opening bars of the first piano concerto in D minor, and by the time pianist Peter Serkin made his entrance, tender and mysterious, they were parting to reveal snatches of stars. I felt the cool summer night’s breeze and the murmur of the tree next to me as the melody, romantic but never sappy (no pun intended), radiated out from the shed and filled up the darkness. The Romantics communed with nature and tried to capture it — the Pastoral Symphony is the result of Beethoven’s walks in the countryside — and Brahms could have easily been imagining a forest after sunset when he composed the music.
He did love grass, or at least its symbolism, setting part of his German Requiem to this text from the Old Testament: “For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.” In the piano concerto’s expansive opening movement, I nearly cried at the beauty of the circle of fifths, which communicate the circle of life so honestly; green grass now, dead grass later, green grass again, and on it goes. After the intermission was more Brahms, his fourth symphony.
Everyone should take a trip to Tanglewood to experience the great composers, horizontally, under the stars.
