This Weekend's Programs in Brief

July 31-Aug 2, 2026

Boston Symphony Orchestra Music Director Andris Nelsons has made a practice of leading concert performances of the great opera repertoire at Tanglewood, including Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca and La bohème, Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold (with the BSO) and Die Walküre (with the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra), and two of the three operas Wolfgang Amadè Mozart wrote with his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, namely Così fan tutte and Don Giovanni. On Saturday, Nelsons leads the remaining work in that trilogy, the comedy The Marriage of Figaro.

Based on Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s controversial play, The Marriage of Figaro tweaks the ruling classes through the depiction of two clever women (Susanna and the Countess) scheming to undermine the entitled Count, with the sometimes-misguided abetment of Susanna’s husband-to-be, the former barber and con man Figaro. The themes of Beaumarchais’s Figaro trilogy, written around the time of the American Revolution, resonated with the spirit of democracy and political restlessness that also led to the overthrow of the French monarchy.

We say without fear of contradiction that The Marriage of Figaro is one of the greatest works in the history of the art form. The outstanding cast features Hanna-Elisabeth Müller as the Countess, Nikola Hillebrand as Susanna, Michael Sumuel as Figaro, and Joshua Hopkins as the Count.

Friday night’s concert is led by composer-conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who is in residence at Tanglewood this summer as Director of the Tanglewood Music Center’s Festival of Contemporary Music and leads both the BSO and the TMC Orchestra. The concert opens with the passionate and musically groundbreaking Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Sibelius—who acknowledged an early fascination with Wagner—continued to innovate in his symphonic works throughout his life. His last completed symphony, the Seventh is, unusually, a one-movement work, highlighting the composer’s concern with the organic, fluid transformation of his musical ideas. Salonen’s longtime collaborator Yefim Bronfman, also a frequent BSO soloist, is pianist for Ludwig van Beethoven’s magisterial and powerful Emperor Concerto.

Sunday, Andris Nelsons leads his last Tanglewood concert of the summer, conducting violinist Joshua Bell in Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy. This marks Bell’s 37th summer performing at Tanglewood since his 1989 debut here. Opening the program is American composer Sarah Kirkland Snider’s recent Marmoris, the title of which means “the shimmering surface of the sea.” She wrote this atmospheric, dynamic piece in 2024. Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 3, Rhenish, closes the program. Schumann lived near the Rhine toward the end of his life, when he wrote this muscular yet lyrical symphony.

Robert Kirzinger