E-Mail This Article to a Friend Centered The Tanglewood Music Center gets its summer on BY DAVID WEININGER

It’s not uncommon to hear carping about the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Tanglewood season. Too much familiar repertoire, you might hear, and too much repetition from the BSO season just passed. The carpers are more or less right, but there’s a reason: during the summer, the orchestra has to switch from a subscription-weekend format to a schedule in which programs can change daily and rehearsal time is scarce. Thus, though the BSO may be the biggest draw at the House That Serge Built, it’s rarely the site of Tanglewood’s most imaginative programming. But for that, we have the Tanglewood Music Center, the summer outfit’s teaching arm. Here, students and faculty work through and perform music from an array of genres and eras, an unorthodox repertoire that balances out the more traditional offerings at the Koussevitzky Music Shed.

Most TMC events take place on the smaller stage of Ozawa Hall, which will celebrate its tenth anniversary this summer with a visit from its Seiji himself. That’s more than a little ironic, since during most of Ozawa’s tenure at the BSO he took little interest in the TMC, and when he decided to assert his leadership, toward the end of his reign, the ensuing disruption led to the resignations of two long-time music-center faculty members, Gilbert Kalish and Leon Fleisher. But all of this will doubtless be long forgotten when Ozawa arrives in the Berkshires August 1 — his first visit to Massachusetts since leaving the BSO in 2002 — to conduct the hall’s tenth-anniversary gala. He’ll lead the TMC orchestra in music by Takemitsu, and erstwhile guest John Williams will conduct Leonard Bernstein’s Benediction, which was first performed in the hall’s inaugural concert. Pianist Yundi Li will be around to offer solo works by Liszt and Chopin.

By then, however, the young musicians will have been through a month’s worth of more invigorating activity. The TMC Orchestra’s first concert of the season (July 5) is solely for "Friends of Tanglewood." But instead of the well-worn favorites you might expect to populate such a program, the orchestra and guest conductor Ingo Metzmacher will offer the Variations for Orchestra by TMC alumnus Luigi Dallapiccola, Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. One can’t help feeling that Metzmacher — who regularly assembles some of the most adventurous programs around — will find more to sink his teeth into here than he will in his BSO program of Mozart (the Overture to Die Zauberflöte and Piano Concerto No. 27, with Emanuel Ax) and Shostakovich (Symphony No. 1) six days later.

Last year, the major offerings consisted of a pair of operatic world premieres from Robert Zuidam and Osvaldo Golijov. The opera production this year is less ambitious — how could it not be? — but far from ordinary: Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a musical fantasy rendering of literature’s most sublime dramatic fantasy. Stefan Asbury conducts, and David Kneuss directs, the two performances at the Tanglewood Theatre (July 29 and 31). An even rarer Britten event forms the last of the TMC’s chamber-music concerts on August 22: a complete performance of his five Canticles, along with his almost unknown Cabaret Songs.

Another of last summer’s highlights was the collaboration between the TMC musicians and Mark Morris Dance Group. MMDG will return on July 1 and 2 for performances of works by Bach, Vivaldi, and Bartók choreographed by Morris and conducted by Craig Smith. A new experiment is an "Inter-Arts Project" that will pair young composers with filmmakers for an exploration of film scoring. The results will be heard as a Prelude to the Boston Pops’ own night of film music on August 14. NEC’s Michael Gandolfi heads up the undertaking.

A more time-honored tradition is the annual Festival of Contemporary Music, an area in which Tanglewood has excelled all the way back to its Koussevitzky days. The festival is again under the direction of Robert Spano, one of the most intrepid musical adventurers in our midst. Birthdays are one theme this year: Bernard Rands is 75 and Elliott Carter a spry 95, and both will be well represented. Spano is also exploring music by the current crop of Finnish composers, including Magnus Lindberg, Kaija Saariaho, Aulis Sallinen, and Los Angeles Philharmonic music director Esa-Pekka Salonen. Details for most of the festival’s concerts — which are packed into five days between August 12 and 16 — have yet to be announced, but the final concert by the orchestra will feature Carter’s Holidays Overture, Salonen’s Insomnia, and the late Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia, which will likely sound like standard repertoire in this context.

That’s a lot for one summer — which is the point. Adventurous music needs no holidays, not even in the Berkshires’ summer paradise. For details, visit the Tanglewood Web site — www.tanglewood.org — or call (617) 266-1492.