LENOX — Things feel a little different this summer at Tanglewood. The gate through which I used to enter is now closed to the public, and the kindly man who waved me in for years is no longer sitting in his usual chair with a paperback. Metal detectors stand sentinel at every entrance, and there are a few new bullet points in the list of prohibited items and activities, including anything “intended for protest or solicitation of any kind, including demonstration signs.”
If you know why that one’s there already, you don’t need me to explain it. It’s been four months since the world learned that Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Andris Nelsons’s formerly evergreen contract would terminate after the 2027 Tanglewood season, with the official reason being that the Latvian conductor was “not aligned on future vision” with the orchestra’s C-suite and board. Since then, many of the orchestra’s musicians and patrons have been loudly and publicly disagreeing with the decision to oust Nelsons, some pointing it out as a symptom of leadership systemically devaluing or ignoring the day-to-day experience and perspectives of the musicians.
Perhaps the prohibition on protest signs was already coming down the Pike. However, according to the Wayback Machine web page archive, the new rule appeared online at some point between last December and this June, and it was only this spring after Nelsons’s contract was terminated that some determined supporters started staking out street corners near Symphony Hall before concerts, holding signs with Nelsons’s likeness on them, and handing out the red rose pins that became the official symbol of the dissenters after the majority of the orchestra’s musicians started wearing them on stage. Two plus two usually equals four.
Most of the musicians were wearing the rose pins this opening weekend; not all of them, but one has to scan the stage pretty thoroughly to find those who aren’t wearing them. At the beginning of the programs Nelsons conducted, they entered the stage en masse, as they had done in Boston for all of Nelsons’s Symphony Hall programs post-March 6. But — and here’s the beautiful and terrible thing about all this — to hear this weekend’s three concerts, you’d never know about the volcano of intrigue rumbling backstage. Under the baton of Nelsons on Friday and Saturday and the bare hands of Fabio Luisi on Sunday, the orchestra delivered the music it plays best, at its best.
Friday’s intermissionless all-Tchaikovsky program began with pianist Seong-Jin Cho on the soloist’s bench, where he turned out a deftly majestic rendition of the Piano Concerto No. 1 while mind-melding with Nelsons and the orchestra. In technique and expressivity, Cho was ethereally flexible. The iconic opening chords made the Shed ring like a bell, and later he seemed to be leaning into harmonic tension and storing up electric, ferocious energy through the middle of the first movement only to about-face into exquisitely delicate lyricism, the laws of physics thus defied.
After that came four scenes from “Swan Lake,” with Boston Ballet dancers Viktorina Kapitonova and Patrick Yocum joining the orchestra for the White Swan pas de deux. Principal harpist Jessica Zhou set the scene with sinewy arpeggios; concertmaster Nathan Cole’s exposed, extended concertmaster solo had a few sore spots with tuning, but he recovered and adjusted quickly. (In a fight between a muggy Berkshires night and a violin, the former has the advantage.) I’m no dance critic, but Kapitonova’s White Swan was eerie and enchanting, her movements conveying the impression that she hadn’t fully transformed out of her bird form, or at least wasn’t used to inhabiting a human body. Next time she’s up at Boston Ballet, I’m buying a ticket.
Saturday night, Nelsons and the BSO presented Mozart at his most symphonic with the Piano Concerto No. 25, and Mahler at his most whimsical with Symphony No. 4. Emanuel Ax, whose association with Tanglewood spans almost a half-century, brought his trademark unfussy elegance to the piano bench for the Mozart concerto, and that plus his Schubert encore was the perfect counterweight to the hour of Mahlerian delirium on the other side of intermission. Nelsons took Mahler’s tempo instructions to heart — “do not hurry” in the first movement, “without haste” in the second — and the result was a deliberate danse macabre, the orchestra answering Cole’s bone-dry solos with jarring, jagged trills. The final movement of this one features a song illustrating a child’s vision of heaven, including descriptions of all the vegetables and fruits the gardeners let you pick on the other side of the pearly gates; the orchestra leaned into the euphoria more with every verse, but soprano Erin Morley sounded somewhat half there.
The weekend’s trifecta of pianists was complete on Sunday with Eric Lu, a relatively new face compared to established superstar Cho and elder statesman Ax. Lu, who was raised in Bedford, took home the grand prize at last fall’s Chopin International Piano Competition after winning third place there in 2015 as a teenager behind Cho, and there have been more eyes on him ever since. His rendition of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the BSO on Sunday shone like a string of baroque pearls; even the chattering sparrows in the rafters fell conveniently silent during the sublime slow movement. His clean and straightforward candor was somewhat reminiscent of Ax’s performance the night before, and I hope he’ll also imitate Ax in returning to Tanglewood many times.
To open the concert, Luisi led “What do flowers do at night?,” an entrancing little tone poem by German composer Sophia Jani, composer in residence at the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, which Luisi directs. The afternoon ended with a passionate but strongly centered run through Brahms’s Symphony No. 2; a joyfully melancholy meditation on impermanence perfect for a summer afternoon. I listened to the symphony from the lawn, and can confirm that the audio team continues to do excellent work. Even the little sound of the bows bouncing on the strings made it through the speakers.
BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Tanglewood, Lenox. July 10-12. www.tanglewood.org
A.Z. Madonna can be reached at az.madonna@globe.com. Follow her @knitandlisten.