FRIDAY, JULY 20 – CHRISTOPH ESCHENBACH AND DAN ZHU JOIN BSO FOR BERNSTEIN AND TCHAIKOVSKY
The Boston Symphony Orchestra plays music by one of Tanglewood’s most important alumni on Friday, July 20, at 8:30 p.m., when National Symphony Orchestra Music Director Christoph Eschenbach—whose Tanglewood history dates back to a 1969 appearance as piano soloist—and young violinist Dan Zhu join the orchestra for Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade (after Plato’sSymposium) for violin and orchestra, a seldom-heard work representing some of the legendary conductor-composer’s most intriguing music. This performance of Bernstein’s Serenade recalls Midori’s historic 1986 performance of the same work, when at age 14 she shocked and inspired audience, orchestra, and conductor as she continued playing with great poise after breaking not one, but two strings during her performance, each time having to trade violins with a member of the BSO’s violin section and make immediate adjustments going from a three-quarter–size instrument to full-size instrument with each trade. As on that 1986 concert, the program concludes with Tchaikovsky’s cherished, emotionally intense Symphony No. 6, Pathétique.

SATURDAY, JULY 21 – BSO RECREATE THE 1937 CONCERT THAT INSPIRED THE CREATION OF THE SHED
The following night marks the season’s third recreation of a seminal concert in Tanglewood’s history. At the all-Wagner concert that opened the 1937 festival’s second weekend, rain and thunder twice interrupted the RienziOverture and necessitated the omission altogether of the Forest Murmurs from Siegfried, music too delicate to be heard through the downpour. At the intermission, Miss Gertrude Robinson Smith, one of the festival’s founders, made an appeal to raise funds for a permanent structure, and soon thereafter, plans were underway for a “music pavilion,” resulting in the construction of the Shed, the BSO’s current day concert venue since 1938. On Saturday, July 21, at 8:30 p.m., conductor and Wagner specialist Asher Fisch makes his BSO and Tanglewood debuts conducting the BSO in the very same all-Wagner program—which also includes the Prelude and Love-death from Tristan und Isolde, the Ride of the Valkyries from Die Walküre, and the Prelude to Parsifal—this time sheltered by the iconic Koussevitzky Music Shed.

SUNDAY, JULY 22 – KURT MASUR LEADS ALL-MOZART PROGRAM WITH GERHARD OPPITZ AS SOLOIST
In yet another nod to history on Sunday, July 22, at 2:30 p.m., the BSO presents an all-Mozart program—a popular model in the early years of the festival—led by Kurt Masur (a Tanglewood guest more than 25 times) and featuring pianist Gerhard Oppitz in the Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K.491, among the very greatest and most dramatic of Mozart’s works in the genre and one of just two in a minor key. Also on the program are the Symphony No. 36, Linz—which bears the name of the Austrian city in which it was composed over a period of just four days in 1783—and one of Mozart’s most enduringly popular works, Eine kleine Nachtmusik.

BRIEF OVERVIEW OF TANGLEWOOD
Tanglewood, one of the world’s most beloved music festivals and the famed summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra located in the beautiful Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, celebrates its 75th anniversary season, June 22-September 2, with a spectacular lineup of musical guests and programs that spotlight Tanglewood’s rich tradition of presenting summertime concerts at their best since 1937. Tickets, priced from $9 to $117 for regular season concerts, are available at tanglewood.orgor at 888-266-1200; tanglewood offers free lawn tickets to young people age 17 and under and a 50% discount on lawn tickets to college and graduate students.

PERFORMANCES IN OZAWA HALL ON JULY 25 AND 26
WEDNESDAY, JULY 25, AND THURSDAY, JULY 26 – GERHARD OPPITZ COMPLETES BRAHMS ODYSSEY
Gerhard Oppitz completes his remarkable four-recital transversal of Brahms’s complete works for solo piano in Ozawa Hall on Wednesday, July 25, at 8 p.m., and Thursday, July 26, at 8 p.m. The July 25 performance includes Six Piano Pieces, Op. 118; Variations on a Theme by Paganini, Op. 35; Sixteen Waltzes, Op. 39; and Seven Fantasies, Op. 116. The July 26 recital features the Sonata No. 2 in F-sharp minor, Op. 2; Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, Op. 24; Eight Piano Pieces, Op. 76; and Three Intermezzi, Op. 117.

PERFORMANCES BY THE TANGLEWOOD MUSIC CENTER, THE BSO’S SUMMER MUSIC ACADEMY
MONDAY, JULY 23 – TMCO EXPLORES 20TH-CENTURY WORKS BY IVES, SCHOENBERG, AND STRAVINSKY
On Monday, July 23, maestro Stefan Asbury and TMC Conducting Fellowstake the reins of the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra for an 8 p.m. Ozawa Hall program of 20th-century music. The program begins with Ives’sThree Places in New England, the third movement of which pays musical tribute to the Housatonic River at Stockbridge, just a few miles down the road from Tanglewood. Also on the program are Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto, featuring longtime Tanglewood guest Emanuel Ax as soloist, Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka, based on a traditional Russian puppet character and one of the composer’s several masterpieces composed for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.