Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, celebrating its 75th anniversary this season, will offer ticket discounts to residents of the Pioneer Valley and Capital Region on August 3 and 5, respectively. Tanglewood will offer 50% off Shed tickets for the Lorin Maazel-led BSO performance at 8:30 p.m. on Friday, August 3, to all residents of the Pioneer Valley. Residents of the Capital Region will be offered 50% off Shed tickets for the world premiere of Michael Gandolfi’s Night Train to Perugia on Sunday, August 5, at 2:30 p.m. Pioneer Valley Night and Capital Region Day discount tickets go on sale beginning Sunday, July 29, and may be redeemed atwww.tanglewood.org/pioneervalley, www.tanglewood.org/capitalregion, in person at the Tanglewood Box Office, or by calling 888-266-1200. These offers are for 50% off Shed tickets to BSO performances only and do not apply to lawn tickets. The new ticket offers extend the Berkshire Resident discount program, which alongside other county-based discounts has raised attendance by Berkshire County residents from 3% in the 2008 BSO Tanglewood season to 8% in 2011. Tanglewood’s annual Berkshire Night took place July 20 this season, allowing 1,000 year-round residents of the Berkshires to enjoy the Friday-evening BSO concert for free.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 3 – GERALD FINLEY JOINS LORIN MAAZEL AND BSO FOR MUSIC BY MOZART AND RAVEL
Following his August 2 recital, baritone Gerald Finley moves from Ozawa Hall to the Shed Friday, August 3, at 8:30 p.m., to join revered maestro Lorin Maazel, a TMC Fellow in 1951 and ’52, and the BSO for Ravel’s Don Quichotte à Dulcinée—the last work Ravel completed before succumbing to the debilitating neurological condition that silenced him in his final few years—and arias fromCosì fan tutte, The Marriage of Figaro, and Don Giovanni by Mozart, a composer in whose music Mr. Finley is especially respected. The program also includes Ravel’s colorful Alborada del gracioso and Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 2—a BSO specialty and a work that was performed in the first Tanglewood season in 1937—as well as Mozart’s Symphony No. 38, Prague. Pioneer Valley residents should visit www.tanglewood.org/pioneervalley, the Tanglewood Box Office, or call 888-266-1200 for 50% off Shed tickets to this performance.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 5 – MAAZEL AND BSO GIVE WORLD PREMIERE OF GANDOLFI’S NIGHT TRAIN TO PERUGIA
Mr. Maazel once again takes the podium Sunday, August 5, at 2:30 p.m., to lead the BSO in a program featuring the world premiere of Night Train to Perugia, a new BSO-commissioned work by Michael Gandolfi, who was a TMC Fellow in 1986 and has been a member of the TMC Faculty since 1997. The elegant and engaging French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet is soloist in Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 5, Egyptian, nicknamed for the fact that it was written in that country and was influenced by the music of its region. The concert concludes in thrilling fashion with Berlioz’s Symphonie fastastique, another work at the heart of the BSO repertoire and which the orchestra first performed in 1885. Residents of the Capital Region should visit www.tanglewood.org/capitalregion, the Tanglewood Box Office, or call 888-266-1200 for 50% off Shed tickets to the 2:30 p.m. performance.

The title for Michael Gandolfi’s brief and fast-paced Night Train to Perugia came to him with the assistance of Boston-based writer Dana Bonstrom, who suggested a number of titles based on experiments carried out at the CERN particle accelerator. Mr. Gandolfi said that “the image of a neutrino beam traveling at light-speed underground from Switzerland through Perugia, Italy, among a host of cities, and ultimately to the Gran Sasso laboratory, to empirically test the boundaries of physics, aligned perfectly with the abstract imaginings of my piece.” Upon further investigation, Mr. Gandolfi says he became awestruck by humankind’s ability to conceive of and then construct the equipment required to realize the CERN experiments. He also notes that while he believes the creativity and ingenuity exhibited in the scientific community intersects with the creative requirements of musical composition, there is one major difference: “if a scientific experiment is not construed and executed with absolute precision, it simply fails, whereas a musical composition doesn’t ‘fail’ under similar conditions; it wobbles, and sometimes the wobble produces results that outshine those of the original design! I don’t intend forNight Train to Perugia to ‘run off the track,’ but if it does, the piece will exist; albeit with a few surprises and perhaps, unforeseen improvements.” The BSO was involved in the commissioning of Gandolfi’sImpressions from ‘The Garden of Cosmic Speculation’and the Boston Symphony Chamber Players premieredhis Plain Song, Fantastic Dances in 2005. He is currently composing a work for organ and orchestra—a BSO commission to be premiered in 2015.

TICKET INFORMATION IN BRIEF
Tanglewood, this year celebrating its 75th anniversary as the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, opened on Friday, June 22, with the return of Yo-Yo Ma and his Silk Road Ensemble, and closes September 2, with a Boston Pops concert led by Thomas Wilkins and featuring the ever-popular Michael Feinstein. For detailed information about the 2012 Tanglewood season, including how to purchase tickets, priced from $9 to $117 for regular season concerts, visit www.tanglewood.org. Tickets are available through Tanglewood’s website, www.tanglewood.org, and through SymphonyCharge at888-266-1200. Tanglewood continues to offer free lawn tickets to young people age 17 and under and a 50% discount on lawn tickets to college and graduate students.