E-Mail This Article to a Friend Goin’ west Tanglewood, version 2005 BY DAVID WEININGER

It’s July again, and that’s when classical-music-loving New Englanders decamp to the Berkshires. Although Tanglewood is the summer home of the BSO, the orchestra is rarely the most interesting thing happening there, not with the chamber concerts, the Festival of Contemporary Music, and all the activities at the Music Center, Tanglewood’s student and young-musician arm.

The BSO is nonetheless the biggest game in Lenox. And in case you’ve been living on Jupiter or under a rock for the past year (wait, better make that the past three years): the orchestra has a new music director and his name is James Levine. His first BSO season was marked by gushing praise and a few quibbles over programming. Now he starts his first Tanglewood summer as music director the same way he did the BSO season back in October: with Mahler’s gigantic Eighth Symphony, on July 8. That was a wild and spontaneous performance, long on excitement and sometimes short on polish; it’ll be interesting to hear how a year with the orchestra and a new setting affect the interpretation this time around. Levine’s other summer programs with the BSO include all four Brahms symphonies over two concerts — Nos. 3 and 2 on July 22, Nos. 4 and 1 on July 23 — and a July 17 concert drawing on two programs from the past season that comprises Harbison, Wuorinen, Varèse, and Gershwin.

Guest conductors for the summer include old friends Charles Dutoit, Kurt Masur, Ingo Metzmacher, and David Robertson. One welcome new face is Marin Alsop, who makes her BSO debut on August 20. Right now, she’s the world’s best-known woman conductor; maybe in a few years she’ll just be known as an excellent conductor. (Check out her recent discs of American music for Naxos.) At Tanglewood, she’ll do the Barber Cello Concerto with Yo-Yo Ma, Christopher Rouse’s Rapture, and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony.

Levine’s own Tanglewood activities also include a Wagner program with the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra on July 16: Act I of Die Walküre and Act III of Götterdämmerung, with soprano Deborah Voigt as Sieglinde and Brünnhilde. The TMCO will also perform with Kurt Masur on July 3 (Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, Dutilleux’s The shadows of time, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony), Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos on August 15 (Beethoven’s Pastorale Symphony, Richard Strauss’s Don Juan and Der Rosenkavalier Suite), and Stefan Asbury on August 8 in works by Steven Stucky, Julian Philips, and Lee Hyla. That’s part of the annual Festival of Contemporary Music. The other FMC highlight is a visit by the crack new-music group eighth blackbird on August 7. You know you’re in unfamiliar territory when Frederic Rzewski is the old master on a program with Derek Bremel, Gordon Fitzell, and David Gordon.

Chamber-music concerts and recitals in Ozawa Hall include the Juilliard Quartet on July 1, the Emerson on July 21, Deborah Voigt on July 12, and baritone Matthias Goerne on August 2. (No piano recitals this year!) The Beaux Arts Trio marks the 50th anniversary of its first concert (also at Tanglewood) with, what else, a Beethoven program on July 14.

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