The Leonard Bernstein Centennial Memorial Concert
Resident Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Andris Nelsons welcomes living legend Yo-Yo Ma to Tanglewood for the special one-afternoon-only Leonard Bernstein Centennial Memorial Concert featuring a vibrant program of Copland, Bernstein, Williams and Bartok. Fittingly, proceedings begin with Copland's Outdoor Overture, a brightly optimistic celebration of Americana and the country's great outdoors.
Yo-Yo Ma then flexes his incredible bowing technique in Bernstein's Three Meditations from Mass, a dramatic fusion of ancient Latin liturgy with original English music-theatre compositions. Ma will then stay on stage for the world premiere of John Williams' Highwood Ghost, a fantasia expressly written for the cellist and harpist Jessica Zhou. The program closes with Bartok's stirring Concerto for Orchestra, a soul-stirring five-movement piece that bears echoes of his Hungarian folk music influence and ends in a gloriously epic fugue.