Every July, the Tanglewood Music Center creates what the late administrator Richard Ortner liked to call “the annual miracle”—bringing together roughly 100 skilled young orchestral musicians from all over the world, most of whom did not know each other, and a fair number of whom spoke relatively little English, and within a week producing a concert at a professional level. That event occurred this year on July 7^th, when the TMC Orchestra made its first appearance of the summer with a program led by three different conductors. On the first half, this summer’s Conducting Fellows each led one piece; and on the second half, their coach for the week—in this case Music Director Andris Nelsons—led a work in the second half. (This first concert took place in the Shed; other programs in this series will be given in Ozawa Hall.)

This first program of the season comprised Bedřich Smetana and Johannes Brahms works from the 1870s, a period of high romanticism. The Smetana half oggered the first two movements of composer’s nationalistic score Ma Vlast (My Fatherland), which contains in all six tone poems celebrating Bohemia’s history, geography, and legend. The first two movements make a convenient programmatic pair, since the main theme of the first, Vyšehrad (The High Castle) recurs at the very end of the second, Vltava (The Moldau).

Leonard Weiss led Vyšehrad, a musical evocation of the Middle Ages presented as a musical picture of a 14^th-century castle beside the river Moldau on the outskirts of Prague. Today, all that remains of the fortress are the bottom few feet of the stone walls, but it suggests a powerful structure that once stood here, and Smetana’s music invokes heroism and the song of ancient bards. The opening theme, presented by two harps in unison, actually offers the composer’s signature in its first two pitches, B-flat and E-flat, which in German nomenclature are called B and S (Es)—for Bedřich Smetana. (Bach was not the only composer who signed his name in musical pitches.) Weiss, an Australian conductor, is the assistant conductor of the Melbourne Symphony. He has studied with Marin Alsop, Riccardo Muti, and Giannandrea Noseda, as well as previously at the Tanglewood Music Center.  He projected the color and nobility inherent in the music, which is partially derived from Smetana’s fourth opera Libuše, which is little known outside his homeland but which is regarded there as the great national opera of the Czech Republic.

The second Smetana score is probably his best known, the musical depiction of the Moldau (Vltava in Czech) from two mountain rivulets that join into a larger stream and flow down until it eventually courses past Prague (with a reference to Vyšehrad) before disappearing in the east. This was conducted by Yiran Zhao, a quadruple-threat musician (conductor, composer, pianist, and soprano) who is currently a conducting fellow at the Curtis Institute of Music. She has an undergraduate degree in piano and composition from the Westminster Choir College, a master’s in choral conducting from Yale School of Music, and is also an assistant conductor of the Eastman Musica Nova. She elegantly shaped the varying colors of The Moldau, from its two flutes representing the first flowing waters, then growing into the flowing river that passes a country wedding and continues through a moonlit night and dramatic rapids before passing the great castle in Prague.

For the second half, Andris Nelsons led Brahms’s lyrical yet tautly constructed Second Symphony, with its seemingly relaxed themes built with tiny musical atoms and its rhythmic offsets in further development—a piece of extraordinarily precise craftsmanship that continues to sound relaxed through much of its length.

All three performances showed the 2025 version of the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra as an ensemble in the same major league as its predecessors. No doubt future concerts will find the players achieving a smoother blend of instruments and sectional sonority than in this first encounter, but the effect was rich and full and precise. After the end of the Brahms, Nelsons brought the two Fellowship conductors out with him to receive the continuing applause of the substantial audience in the Shed. 

Steven Ledbetter is a freelance writer and lecturer on music. He got his BA from Pomona College and PhD from NYU in Musicology. He taught at Dartmouth College in the 1970s, then became program annotator at the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1997.