Tanglewood – Summer 2010

My sister, Laura, spent the summer at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, MA.  She was one of the handful of vocal fellows who were invited to participate in the festival.

During our time visiting Brooklyn, NY, Joey and I traveled with Lisa to Lenox, which is in the Berkshires.  Lisa commented that the trip to Tanglewood made our experience of New York City in the summer very authentic – extreme heat and humidity, several days of riding the subway and pounding the pavement, and then an escape to the much cooler country!

Tanglewood is an amazing place.  It has all kinds of musical artists: instrumentalists, singers, composers, and conductors.  There are multiple venues and practice areas.  When we visited we were able to simply walk around the grounds and listen to the various rehearsals that were going on.  We got to hear Laura during her vocal coaching.  We also happened to be there on the right day to hear Yo-Yo Ma practicing with the orchestra.  Amazing!

We saw Laura sing a cycle of Cuban folk songs in a vocal recital.  She sang Luciano Berio’s Circles during the Festival of Contemporary Music.  We got to hear her practice this piece a little bit.  It is very modern and unusual, with bursts of vocalization.  She really got excited about performing something that was new and challenging.

Sadly we could not attend the performance, but she got rave reviews from the New York Times, which said, “And on Sunday Laura Mercado Wright, a mezzo-soprano, gave a stunningly agile account of Berio’s Circles, in which she occasionally played percussion (and provided gestural cues) as well.”  The Boston Musical Intelligencer, a virtual journal and blog of the classical music scene in Boston, also had good things to say, “Mercado-Wright may safely call this “her own” now with her masterful performance and the perfect voice for it: rich but not fat; a low range that speaks, and a high one that is graceful; and perfect diction for projecting words or sounds.”

As always I am so proud of all that Laura has accomplished.  I just cannot help bragging.