When Esa-Pekka Salonen came aboard as director of Tanglewood’s 2026 Festival of Contemporary Music, he sought to curate programs that both honored the past and looked ahead to the future. This week’s concerts may bridge the gap between the old and new. But the FCM’s first concert at Ozawa Hall on Thursday night expressed something personal for Salonen. Comprising works by Oliver Knussen, Kaija Saariaho, and Steven Stucky, the concert served as both celebration and reflection, honoring the memory and legacies those composers left behind.

Salonen befriended them all. Knussen served roles as mentor and critic for the young Finnish composer and conductor. Saariaho stood in as “the big sister I never had,” he told the crowd Thursday night. And Stucky functioned as professional partner when Salonen took over as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a partnership that resulted in the premieres of several of Stucky’s scores, including Stucky’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning Second Concerto for Orchestra. 

For Salonen, these composers helped redefine what music can be. Each challenged tradition while building upon it, stimulating our ears in the process. Performed by fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center, the concert honored their memory like any close friend would: with a mix of sorrow and happy memories of times well spent.

Like Salonen, Knussen suffered tremendous loss when his wife Susan Freedman died in 2003. His Requiem—Songs for Sue sets poems by Emily Dickinson, Antonio Machado, W.H. Auden, and Rainer Maria Rilke that cover the range of emotions one experiences following the death of a life partner. Dissonant washes of sound convey profound anger, as if clinging to the past. Vocal passages flow in spurts but retain the stark assurance of forlorn certainties. There’s little comfort in this music, only stark reminders that life, for the bereaved, has changed dramatically. 

Soprano Zoe McCormick relayed the texts’ pent-up sorrow and rage. Conductor Sunny Xia’s deliberate gestures coaxed dark sonorities in Dickinson’s “Is its true, dear Sue” and Machado’s “Cuando murió su amado?,” a poem detailing the effects of loneliness. Hints of warmth crept into the chamber ensemble in the opening of Auden’s “Time will say nothing but I told you so.” But solace remained just out of reach. The woodwinds, French horn, and strings unleashed torrents of dissonance to counter McCormick’s hymnic solemnity. Rilke’s “Bist du noch da?” concluded the set with ghostly shimmers, the music grasping for any sense of resolution. 

Saariaho’s Lohn captured similar feelings of love and loss. Scored for soprano and electronics, the score explores the yearning of Jaufré Rudel, a 12^th-century Provençal poet who loves another person separated by great distance. But the composer didn’t set the text word-for-word. Rather, she sliced the stanzas up, drew out certain words and phrases, which melded with amplified sounds of thumping metal. The poem’s seven stanzas all but scream for past bliss, ruminate on present hurts, and even curse the person responsible for the subject’s unhappiness. The music channels these emotions to haunting effect. Lucy Fitz Gibbon’s soprano flowered beautifully in all the right moments yet never ceased its wailing torrent. Her singing felt like a cry into the void.

Stucky’s Four Poems of A.R. Ammons felt just as deep and personal. Like Saariaho, Stucky’s music never soothes. Instead, it jolts forward suddenly, resting momentarily on bristly harmonies. Yet the vocal lines frequently soar, suggesting via Ammon’s text that all may not be lost. The lines don’t reflect hope, per se, but they cast death more as a journey into the unknown. In the final lines, a departed spirit steps boldly into the great silence. Dense clusters of harmony paint an eerie picture, bleak yet shrouded in mystery. Baritones Holden Turner and Raphaël Laden-Guindon revealed the humanity etched into every line. Conductor Erie Kont-Vilson conjured unsettled serenity.

Saariaho’s string quartet Terra Memoria achieved just as much in its wordless, 18-minute expanse. Completed in 2006 for the Emerson String Quartet, this work plays upon nuances of texture of timbre. String figures shudder, then charge forward before breaking into fleeting moments of melody. Repeatedly, these passages evaporate into whiffs of harmonics before the cycle begins again. 

In the composer’s own words, such sounds memorialize persons once in her life who had passed away. The music ebbs and flows like grief, only settling into an emotional equilibrium in time. Violinists Miles Huang and Erina Buchholz joined violist Nazeeh Shahid and cellist Evan Nicholson in conveying all its haunting reverence. 

The concert opened with warmer remembrance. Salonen’s Arabesques for Olly unfolds in like a personal vignette of Knussen’s life and work. Drawing from themes from several of Knussen’s pieces, Salonen’s score flickers with energy as it projects soulful balance. Continuous violin trills underscore lyrical arcs from solo cello. Violinist Isabel Tannenbaum, stationed on the second balcony, played her part sensitivity as she rained down her figures onto cellist Hu Lee, whose line danced around them. The performance reminds us that while death may be final, happy memories can help keep the soul alive.

Aaron Keebaugh’s work has been featured in The Musical Times, Corymbus, The Classical Review, Early Music America, BBC Radio 3, and the Arts Fuse, for which he writes regularly about classical music. A musicologist, Aaron teaches at North Shore Community College in Danvers and Lynn.

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News broke earlier today that the management of the Boston Symphony Orchestra will be cracking down on people distributing [and maybe even wearing] flowers and materials in support of conductor Andris Nelsons.

Since March, BSO musicians and many loyal patrons have worn red flowers in support of the Latvian conductor after the BSO board of directors decided not to renew his contract. The red flower campaign has become a symbol of unity at BSO concerts, spreading to the orchestra’s appearances at Tanglewood this summer. 

According to a document obtained by the Boston Globe, BSO staff have been instructed to tell concertgoers that distributing flowers or campaign-related materials is prohibited. Staff are also to inform attendees that flowers must remain out of sight. Anyone caught handing them out will receive a warning and may be asked to leave the premises if necessary.

As of this afternoon, the BSO has not responded to requests for comment.