Tanglewood music festival is an annual festival and school of music held from late June to early September near the town of Lenox, Massachusetts in the United States. The festival is held at the former Berkshire Music Center, now known as the Tanglewood Music Center.
Tanglewood is the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), which is the main orchestra for the festival. The conductor of the BSO is the artistic director of the festival. Throughout the festival, the Tanglewood Music Center offers courses in a variety of subjects, including conducting, opera, instrumental performance, and composition. Thousands of students have attended the courses, including such well-known music figures as the American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. Many European operas have received their U.S. premieres at the festival, including Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Idomeneo and La Clemenza di Tito and British composer Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra acquired the use of the Tanglewood estate for summer performances in late 1936. It gave its first summer concert there in August 1937 under its conductor Serge Koussevitzky. The BSO company built a covered auditorium for orchestral performances at Tanglewood in 1938. In 1940, Koussevitzky founded what is now the Tanglewood Music Center. In 1941, the company built a theater and concert hall, a chamber music hall, and several small studios. The BSO bought land adjacent to Tanglewood in 1986 and began building a new concert hall to replace the original theater and concert hall in the TMC. This new building, together with its studios, rehearsal rooms, and other facilities, was named the Seiji Ozawa Hall, after the Japanese-born conductor Seiji Ozawa, who became the artistic and music director of the Boston Symphony in 1973. Seiji Ozawa Hall opened in 1994.
In 2019, Tanglewood opened a new, four-building complex designed to operate year-round. Named the Linde Center for Music and Learning, the complex houses the new Tanglewood Learning Institute’s activities, rehearsal and performance spaces, and a cafe. The Learning Institute’s activities include concerts, master classes, music demonstrations, and workshops.
