Dr. Jeremy Yudkin returns with the 42nd season of his 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 2025 schedule will be as follows:
Sunday, July 6. All-Beethoven Program.
Why so many Leonore overtures? And: Do you really think you know the Fifth Symphony?
Friday, July 11. Prokofiev on Stage.
How many versions of Romeo and Juliet are there? Shakespeare, Prokofiev, Bernstein…
Sunday, July 13. Sibelius and Smith.
Nature in Finland in 1915 and in California in 2014.
Friday, July 18. Puccini’s Tosca.
A masterpiece of Romantic opera or a “shabby little shocker”?
Sunday, July 20. Yuja and Harriet.
Inspiring women now and then: The Fantastical Symphony and Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2.
Friday, July 25. Bach, Mahler, and Mendelssohn.
What do all these works have in common?
Sunday, July 27. Special Guest: Edwin Barker, Retiring Principal Bass of the BSO.
Orchestral playing at its most brilliant. Day of the Dead, French carnivals, and Beethoven’s Pastoral.
Friday, August 1. Special Guest: Eugene Drucker, Violinist/Founding Member of the Emerson Quartet.
The Korngold Violin Concerto and Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony.
Sunday, August 3. NO LECTURE.
Transcriptions of Beethoven for piano trio.
Friday, August 8. Symphony or Concerto?
Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole and the “New World.”
Sunday, August 10. Another New World.
Pépin, Saint-Saëns, and Mendelssohn in Scotland.
Friday, August 15. Acknowledging the Masters.
Shaw, Tchaikovsky, and Beethoven’s Fourth.
Sunday, August 17. Memory and Memorial.
Grant Still and Sibelius. Liszt, Piano Concerto No. 2.
Friday, August 22. Music for the Infinite.
Poulenc’s Gloria and Gustav Holst’s The Planets.
Sunday, August 24. Special Guest: Carlos Simon, Composer Chair/BSO.
New Look – Old Masterpiece.
Carlos Simon’s new work and 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 and Margery and Lewis Steinberg.