This summer’s Tanglewood experience promises the usual complement of warhorses that are always welcome (Beethoven’s symphonies, La mer, The Planets) and a batch that ought to be retired for years if not decades (The Moldau, 1812 Overture, Saint-Saëns’s Second Piano Concerto, etc.), but warhorses are a major part of what to expect during leisurely summer concerts. The season [complete calendar HERE] leads off with mostly popular events, including James Taylor appearing in a benefit for Tanglewood. There are some notable observances, too, like the sesquicentennial of Ravel’s birth, noted in a generous helping of his usual fare (Mother Goose and Daphnis 2 on one shed concert, both piano concertos on another) but also l’Enfant et les sortilèges, seldom heard and always delicious, and a concert on July 16^th that will include everything he wrote for piano solo. Stravinsky appears on a chamber concert on July 5^th with his Concerto for Two Pianos Soli, a real rarity, nicely paired with Mozart’s Quintet for piano and winds (said to be one of Mozart’s own favorite works).

There’s a generous helping of Russians, besides Tchaikovsky (Violin Concerto, Sym. 4), including a Rachmaninoff evening (Third Concerto, Symphonic Dances; his Symphony no. 2 will be heard on a different evening) and a good bit of Prokofiev (the huge Piano Concerto no. 2 with Yuja Wang, and Romeo and Juliet in part, with some theater), plus Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Of Shostakovich, there’s a concert with his beloved Piano Quintet.

The big concert-opera item this summer will be Tosca, what Joe Kerman immortalized as “that shabby little shocker,” very popular everywhere, and some of Puccini’s chamber music is also planned. But there will also be a new theater-cantata-symphonic piece by Matthew Aucoin on August 7^th called Music for New Bodies, about a “drastic medical procedure.”

Fromm Week will feature music by the director, Gabriela Ortíz, on five successive days beginning July 24^th, as well as music by five other women, and much Mexico. One occasion will be all-percussion, including works by Amadeo Roldán (said to be the first all-percussion composer) as well as Varèse’s Ionisation, which despite its status as a well-known heady classic is almost never heard in performance — don’t miss it (July 25^th). Other important premieres will be that of a new piano concerto by John Williams, written for Emanuel Ax; this is nicely paired with Mahler’s First Symphony.

August 3^rd offers a chamber concert of unusual transcriptions, of Beethoven’s Leonore 3 and Eroica for piano quartet. I know I’d personally enjoy William Grant Still’s Threnody in memory of Sibelius (August 17^th), and, speaking once more of warhorses, Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole and Dvořák’s New World on August 8^th — I never get tired of those two.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert on the music of Alban Berg, Debussy, and other early 20th-century composers. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (Ph.D., 1967), he has published on many music subjects, and edited the revised fourth (1978) and fifth (1987) editions of Harmony by his teacher Walter Piston.