We’ve always enjoyed music at outside pavilions. Wolf Trap in Virginia is our favorite, but we’ve also loved hearing music at the Mann Center in Philadelphia and Interlochen in Michigan.
Tanglewood in Massachusetts is known around the world as the summer home of the Boston Symphony and is a frequent host to the Boston Pops.
It has a long and distinuished history and is also home to the Tanglewood Music Center, a premier music school. In its first year, Aaron Copland was the director and Leonard Bernstein was a student.
In our lifetimes, there have only been three conductors of the Pops, Arthur Fiedler led it for 50 years, John Williams for fifteen years, and for the last 22 years, Keith Lockhart has served as the leader of this very popular orchestra.
We travveled to the Berkshires in western Massachusetts to attend the last concert of the 2017 season at Tanglewood. We were excited to be able to hear the Pops perform selections of John Williams music spanning his entire career and then experience Melissa Etheridge accompanied by the full orchestra. She still has a powerful voice and her performance was electrifying.
While we were in the Berkshires, we also went to Mount Greylock, the highest point in Massachusetts, the Hancock Shaker Village, the Norman Rockwell Museum, and did a driving tour of part of the Berkshires area. On the way home, we stopped at Val-Kill, Eleanor Roosevilt's home in Hyde Park, New York, where the picture above was taken.
We had a great time. Now we’d like to go back in July for the annual James Taylor concert.
