This Weekend's Programs in Brief

Aug 14-16, 2026

For the second time this summer, dance is featured on the Shed stage alongside the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The Martha Graham Dance Company joins the BSO and Assistant Conductor Anna Handler for the Martha Graham/Aaron Copland ballet Appalachian Spring, their iconic collaboration from 1944. Copland worked on the score while at Tanglewood, and the music has been part of the BSO repertoire in its various versions since nearly its premiere. The full, 35-minute ballet will be presented in its original instrumentation, with enhanced string sections. Also on the program is For Martha, part of work recently created by Hope Boykin for the Martha Graham Dance Company and co-commissioned by the BSO. The score was written for the Martha Graham Dance Company by composer/conductor Christopher Rountree, who used as the basis for his piece a fragment of music by Leonard Bernstein thought to have been written for Martha Graham in the 1980s. Closing the program—without dancers—is a symphony that Richard Wagner called “the apotheosis of the dance”—Ludwig van Beethoven’s perennially popular Symphony No. 7.

This summer’s John Williams Film Night is a tribute to the man himself, widely regarded as one of the greatest film composers of all time and a beloved member of the BSO-Pops-Tanglewood family. Our special guests this year are frequent Tanglewood guest conductor Ken-David Masur and host Ben Mankiewicz, well known to many as the knowledgeable and funny host of Turner Classic Movies and member of a celebrated Hollywood creative family. The Boston Pops perform selections from many of Williams’s most popular scores, including E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, music from the Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, and Star Wars series, and more.

On Sunday, the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra plays its final program of the summer in the annual Leonard Bernstein Memorial Concert, led by esteemed conductor, Bernstein protégée, and Tanglewood alumna Marin Alsop. Violinist Ray Chen makes his Tanglewood debut in this program as soloist in Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1, a piece so popular in the composer’s lifetime that he jokingly threatened to ban its performance. Anna Clyne’s joyfully festive Masquerade opens the program, which concludes with Mahler’s grand and serious Fifth Symphony. The Fifth announced a new direction for the composer, who turned away from his song-based symphonies for a trilogy of works aiming to expand further the instrumental tradition he inherited from Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms.

Robert Kirzinger