Tanglewood Creates Its Own Climate on the Lawn

When you make your first trip to Tanglewood, you half-expect to see college students like yourself who have come to enjoy live classical music at a reasonable price. If you've been in the music world for a while, you might even expect to see someone you know. If you don't remember the entrepreneur's adage--"location is everything"--then you'll be as surprised as I was.

Tanglewood, the summer music mecca in western Massachusetts, is an enigma of identity. It is associated with some of the most promising young talent on the eastern seaboard, but its clientele is composed of the wealthy elderly who populate the Berkshires and eastern New York. With their champagne and Heinekens in hand (one wonders how vigilant Tanglewood is regarding alcohol regulations), these folks can be seen leaving an orchestra's final piece prematurely to beat the traffic, or heard to say, "Where's the music coming from?" In the summer, college students in this sparsely populated area are few and far between.

The music is indisputably excellent, though it may be that I visited at the peak. It's not every day that the Israel Philharmonic swings by Pittsfield. Mass. Clearly, the majority of people willing to pay $12 per spot on the lawn knew they were getting good music, or at least what they were told was good music. Nonetheless, most of the conversation that could be heard was more like "Have you met my cousin Morry?" than "Have you heard Zukerman's new Beethoven sonatas?"

There is only so much to be said about an audience, however--they pay their money and support a valuable resource, whether or not they actually enjoy it on the level it is intended. They can use the extensive gift shop and equally extensive list of sponsors to prove their attendance and appreciation, in any case.

The facility itself has superior acoustics for an outdoor theater, supplemented by scores of inconspicuous speakers. Even those of us sitting at the very edge of the theater ("They must have gotten here real early to get those seats!") could hear the soloists nuances without much trouble. For those sitting at the back of the lawn, however, a difference of a couple of hundred feet means that you're paying for cocktail party space more than music. Of course, this arrangement suited some in the audience quite well.

The outdoor setting had disadvantages as well. I was in fact surprised at how uncontrolled the environment seemed to be. In the first movement of the Mozart, a siren began to blare at a very inopportune time in the soloists' duet. In the second movement, the grinding of a large truck, headlights visible through the trees, disturbed the calm. In the last movement, a relatively low-flying plane blasted through the air overhead.

Admittedly, this last indignity could not be prevented. But even the inspired Handel- Halvorsen encore was not immune; an unseen machine producing a sound very much like Darth Vader's breathing, amplified thousands of times, broke the trancelike atmosphere.

The encore provided some redemption for the audience, as the serious listeners were uncannily filtered from the crowd and began to approach the stage while Perlman and Zukerman released their notes into the air. Surprisingly, easily fewer than fifty of Tanglewood's own students showed up to listen to the headliners. Several more appeared after the show, when it was revealed that Perlman was staying late to receive people. The press was afforded no access except to the rapidly growing line outside the backstage doors.

Still, Tanglewood is by no means an unfriendly place. On the contrary, legions of elderly women in long black skirts will smilingly help you with directions, a program, or the best way to avoid having one's feet run over by passing wheelchairs.

I got the distinct impression, however, that I did not fit the mode of this particular sample. The students and clientele alike dressed in a manner that spoke of serious money and, in the former's case, aspirations for imminent adulthood. The program was filled with advertisements for retirement communities. I hadn't brought along a folding beach chair. To make matters worse, I have no gold-sporting cousin named Morry.

The dominant animal at Tanglewood is, without a doubt, the social one, and here lies the crux of the enigma. The social animal does not come to a concert to listen to music; it comes to see, be seen and to be able to recount what it saw. Turnout was probably increased more by the magnitude of the soloists' reputations than the prerequisite quality of their playing. An up-and-coming pair of players might not have fared so well in this environment.

Tanglewood certainly deserves its reputation as a magnet for musical genius and a germinating ground for talent. It wasn't the crowds that kept Aaron Copeland coming back for half a century.

But sadly, of the 15,260 people in attendance on Saturday, those belonging to minority groups also belonged to the ushering corps. Is Tanglewood not accessible to all, or just comfortable with its affluent and reliable if homogeneous and somewhat uninterested clientele? While the exceptional music continues to play, the management should consider ways of keeping the business separate from the cultural treasures.