LENOX, MASS. — They’re here — about 17,000 of them — and they’re gathering at the gates.
They’ve got lawn chairs and blankets, picnic baskets and coolers, multiple cans of bug spray and a single mission: to stake out the very best spot on the sprawling lawns of Tanglewood for the most popular concert of the season, John Williams’ Film Night.
One boy in the queue even has his own portrait of the esteemed film composer, crisply drawn in colored pencil and tucked into a cellophane sheath. His dad asks the guy at the ticket window if he might be able to pass the drawing on to Williams. The ticket guy responds with a soft, unfortunate no, but a few of us reassure him not to lose hope. You never know whom you’ll run into here.
Music lovers have been flocking to the 500-acre hillside campus of Tanglewood since maestro Serge Koussevitzky first brought his Boston Symphony Orchestra to perform here in 1936, establishing its summer residency in the Berkshire County town of Lenox the following year.
Now in its 142nd season, the BSO spends eight weeks of each summer at Tanglewood, performing in the open-air Koussevitzky Music Shed (built in 1938 to replace the original tented venue) and the 1,200-seat Seiji Ozawa Hall (built in 1994 and named for another esteemed erstwhile BSO director).
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Something like 350,000 people pass through these gates each summer — with Film Night reliably accounting for roughly 5 percent of that total. And while music from the Shed generously spills over the hills like the front of cool air that follows sunset each evening, it can be also heard by tens of thousands of additional listeners hundreds of miles away.
This is because since 1952, BSO concerts at Tanglewood have been broadcast by the Boston-based public radio station GBH (formerly WGBH) — a core feature of the long-term relationship between the orchestra and the station, which airs more than 50 BSO concerts per season.
“The seven-decade collaboration between GBH and the BSO to bring music to the widest possible audience is a testament to the unique power of public media in the cultural landscape,” GBH President and CEO Susan Goldberg said in a written statement.
As someone who grew up in central Massachusetts getting to know my local orchestra through the little boombox in my bedroom, I can attest to this alchemy of grandeur and intimacy uniquely granted by live classical radio. Broadcasts from Tanglewood particularly bristle with presence — you can hear every detail of the orchestra, and sometimes even the stubborn starlings chirping in the rafters of the Shed.
These days, BSO broadcasts from Tanglewood (as well as from Symphony Hall in Boston) are carried by CRB (formerly WCRB), the long-standing Boston classical station acquired by GBH in 2009. Tanglewood concerts air live on CRB Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m.; Sunday matinees are delayed for broadcasting at 7 p.m. that day.
Partnering stations further stretch the reach of these broadcasts to Connecticut (WMNR), Upstate New York (WAMC), Western Massachusetts (NEPM) and Rhode Island (WJMF). The broadcasts also stream online, and CRB makes on-demand streams of the concerts available for 30 days after each performance.
In the radio biz, even the sturdiest history is no insurance against what could happen in the next few minutes. Things go wrong and, as luck would have it on this August night, something’s gone wrong.
The connection between the radio station and the William Pierce Broadcast Booth — named for Bill Pierce, the host of more than 3,000 of WGBH’s BSO broadcasts from the mid-1950s until the mid-1980s — is suddenly as iffy as the WiFi.
Taking advantage of the incrementally delayed start time — a courtesy extended to the thousands of attendees still winding their way down the back roads of Lenox to the venue — a team of technicians gets to work troubleshooting. Meanwhile, a bustle of musicians and crew are making final tunings and preparations. A golden harp goes wheeling by, trailed by a string of violinists — I even spot Williams, 91, getting ushered to his green room by a klatch of security guards. (That kid’s drawing really captured him.)
Moments after word comes that the signal has miraculously been restored, Jake Moerschel, director of production, pokes his head through the door of the booth: “It’s 8:20,” he says, referring to the new start time. “And it will be 8:20.”
The booth here, situated just offstage right and sealed from the sounds of the stage, feels like the eye of the storm; and at the core of its calm is Brian McCreath, who this year took over as the main host of GBH’s broadcasts of the BSO.
A former full-time orchestral trumpet player who came to WGBH in 2004 as a digital content producer, McCreath later shifted to production-assistant duties for classical music under host Ron Della Chiesa, who occupied the booth from 1991 until his retirement last year.
For five years, McCreath produced and hosted GBH’s weekend morning classical program, gleaning what he could from Della Chiesa — a master of the form — and refining his own approach to telling the story of the music.
“I think the job of any announcer for a live concert broadcast is to communicate the answer to a question,” McCreath says. “Why should I be listening to this?”
If that seems an obvious question to ask, it wasn’t always. The history of broadcast classical music is also the history of stern, stentorian male voices; the speaking equivalent of words chiseled into marble, like Martin Bookspan (who hosted “Live From Lincoln Center” on PBS from 1976 until 2006) or Bill Pierce.
“That all comes from the Milton Cross tradition,” says GBH General Manager Anthony Rudel, the author of “Hello Everybody! The Dawn of American Radio.”
“Cross was trained by NBC in the ’20s and ’30s to sound like the voice of God — and that was great for a long time,” Rudel says. “But today’s audience, if you don’t give them a story, you’re nowhere. What Brian does better than anyone I know is to create a story out of the show. So even if you don’t know the music, there’s some nugget he’ll give you to bring you in.”
McCreath will spend days before concerts compiling research, interviewing artists, preparing outlines of a script (capable of expanding and contracting as real-time circumstances dictate) and choosing related pieces of music — largely from the station’s expansive Tanglewood archive — for use preconcert and during intermission.
The result is a broadcast that feels authoritative and informed, yet disarmingly personal, as though you’ve brought along a much smarter friend who’s also nice enough to make like he isn’t.
“You know who I actually learned the most from? Baseball announcers,” McCreath remarks in the booth. “Pat Hughes, the announcer for the Cubs, is like my model. He’s so good at making you feel like you’re there, dropping in a little anecdote, making you comfortable. He’s the epitome of what this work is about.”
McCreath works in tandem and tight quarters with director Alan McLellan and audio engineers Antonio Oliart Ros and Nick Squire, who between them have six Grammy wins. Their studio is a tightly packed array of laptops, mixing consoles and monitors. Tonight, they’re managing and mixing live inputs from 60-plus microphones distributed around the stage, the final mix fed into the room by a pair of speakers under a live video feed.
McCreath, meanwhile, is behind a soundproof door in a proper radio booth with a tiny triangular window looking out onto the stage. It feels like the cockpit of a spaceship.
The effect of listening from the booth is an uncanny feeling of impossible closeness and utter removal from the action onstage, but the mix is just right: The strings sing, the timpani thunders, the horns blast — it’s a vivid, colorful sound with not a lot lost in translation.
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Onstage, the Pops don their summer whites, joined for the first half of the program by a guest conductor, film composer David Newman, whose more than 110 scoring credits include “The War of the Roses,” “Heathers,” “Ice Age” and “Girls Trip.”
Williams has his own long history with Tanglewood, where he holds the title of artist in residence. In 1980, he was named the 19th music director of the Boston Pops, succeeding the legendary Arthur Fiedler.
The history of Film Night in particular reaches back to an experimental performance in 1992, when Ozawa led the BSO in a concert of Sergei Prokofiev’s score for Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film “Alexander Nevsky” accompanied by a screening of the film. The official Film Night brand first landed in 2000 and has become an annual tradition (paused only twice to make space for Williams’s 80th and 90th birthday celebrations in 2012 and 2022).
After Williams’s own sparkling arrangement of Richard Whiting’s “Hooray for Hollywood,” Newman led a lively take of the overture to the 1972 Western “The Cowboys,” followed by one of Williams’s favorite pieces of music, Bernard Herrmann’s “Scene D’Amour” from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” — gorgeously played with tremulous delicacy by the Pops.
A suite from Ron Howard’s 1992 romance “Far and Away” preceded the crowd-thrilling theme to 1993’s “Jurassic Park” — as scintillatingly “visual” as Williams’s music gets. A montage of Williams in situ with various directors, actors and orchestras, set to the iconic march from “Superman,” primed the Shed for his second-half appearance.
“I hope this is going to be okay with John,” Newman said from the stage before his departure. “Film music wasn’t played a lot in concert until John took over this great orchestra. Now it’s everywhere. Every orchestra in the world is doing some kind of film music. It’s our music, it’s American music and, if you can believe it, there is one person responsible: It’s John Williams, the Boston Pops and you guys.”
And Williams’s half of the show doubled as a demonstration of the sweeping power and variety of his music — which retains its own sui generis personality even as it changes costumes for different roles. We heard bracing themes such as “The Adventures of Mutt” from “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” and “Duel of the Fates” from “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace” (arguably the best part of that film).
We heard a slightly muddled account of “Dry Your Tears, Afrika” from Steven Spielberg’s 1997 “Amistad,” powerfully sung by Boston University’s Tanglewood Institute Young Artists Vocal Program Chorus. And Assistant Concertmaster Elita Kang led a searing take of the main theme from “Schindler’s List” that seemed to even silence the wind through the trees.
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But it was the “The Asteroid Field” from “Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back” that won the night. Williams remarked from the stage that he had labored over the score only to discover it buried under laser blasts and explosive collisions. “Can you imagine how bruising to the ego of a composer?” he asked to a collective laugh.
Freed from the frenzy of the asteroid field, the depth and richness of Williams’s score could be truly savored, and whatever earwormy theme may have anchored itself in your consciousness was dislodged by a deluge of fresh detail. It was the sonic equivalent of a remastered print — a 4K high-def capture of your deepest cinematic memories.
Knowing how Film Night tends to go, we joined a few thousand others dashing for the exits after the “Throne Room” theme but before the trio of encores: “Helena’s Theme” from “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” the “Flying Theme” from “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and “The Imperial March (Darth Vader’s Theme),” which we managed to catch the tail end of online.
What a strange feeling to hear the same applause filter over the hills and leak out through the speakers in the car, as though you were taking home leftovers from the concert. But such is the magic of Tanglewood, where the music is both in and on the air.
For more information on Tanglewood’s season, visit bso.org/tanglewood.
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