Dr. Jeremy Yudkin is back with the 43rd season of Tanglewood pre-concert talks. These programs will take place in the Town Hall auditorium, located at 6 Walker Street, from 2:30 to 4:00 p.m. on Friday afternoons and Sunday mornings from 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
The Summer 2026 schedule will be as follows:
JULY
Sunday, July 5. Portraits of Lincoln.
Celebrating American and Abraham Lincoln with Aaron Copland, Philip Glass (world premiere!), and John Williams.
Friday, July 10. Tchaikovsky.
His towering Piano Concerto No. 1 and excerpts from the immortal Swan Lake.
Sunday, July 12. Chopin, Brahms, and Jani.
Chopin Piano Concerto No. 2, Brahms’s Second Symphony, and “What do flowers do at night?”
Friday, July 17. Renée Fleming/Hampson/Wakao.
Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto, Carlos Simon’s Meditations on Grace, and excerpts from John Adams’s Nixon in China.
Sunday, July 19. Hayden, Beethoven, Shostakovich.
Haydn’s brilliant Symphony No. 22, Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2.
Friday, July 24. Mozart and Tchaikovsky.
Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 and Tchaikovsky’s experimental Third Symphony (“Polish”).
Sunday, July 26. Tchaikovsky and Mozart.
Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 1, Salonen’s Gambit, and Tchaikovsky’s celebrated Symphony No. 5.
Friday, July 31.Wagner, Sibelius, and Beethoven.
The Tristan Prelude, Sibelius’s magnificent Seventh, and Beethoven’s masterful “Emperor” Concerto.
AUGUST
Sunday, August 2. Nelsons/Joshua Bell.
Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Marmoris, and Schumann’s Third Symphony.
Friday, August 7. Yo-Yo I.
Fauré, Cantique de Jean Racine; Brahms, String Sextet, Op. 36, and his Double Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra.
Sunday, August 9. Yo-Yo II.
Tavener, Mahámátar, Kalhor, Venus in the Mirror, and Golijob, Azul.
Friday, August 14. Music and Dance.
Dance for Martha Graham, Copland’s Appalachian Spring, and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.
Sunday, August 16.
Bruch, Violin Concerto, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, which moves from fatalism to triumph. (Beethoven’s Fifth, anyone?)
Friday, August 21. No lecture.
Sunday, August 23. Beethoven’s Ninth!
Photo by Ben Garver
About the speaker: Jeremy Yudkin is Professor of Music and Co-Director of the Center for Beethoven Research at Boston University. He has served as Visiting Professor of Music at Oxford, Harvard, and the Sorbonne. He is the author of ten books, including From Silence to Sound: Beethoven’s Beginnings (2020) and Understanding Music (Prentice Hall, 1996, 2016), and edited the recently-published 550-page volume The New Beethoven. He also researched and published the first-ever book on the Lenox School of Jazz (2006). He has given hundreds of lectures across Europe, the United States, and Russia and has won numerous awards, including an Award for Excellence in Historical Research for his book on Miles Davis (2008). At Boston University, where he teaches courses on Beethoven, Bartók, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles – among many others – he has been nominated ten times for Metcalf Awards in Teaching and once as Provost’s Scholar-Teacher of the Year.
The pre-concert talks are free thanks to the Lenox Library Association’s Goodwin Fund.