Tanglewood
The Boston Symphony's Berkshire summer home, with Saarinen's open-sided Music Shed and lawn.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra has spent its summers at Tanglewood, a wooded estate spanning Lenox and Stockbridge in the Berkshires, since 1937. The following year Serge Koussevitzky opened the Music Shed that now carries his name, an open-sided fan-shaped pavilion designed by Eliel Saarinen and later given acoustic improvements by the engineer Joseph Franz. It seats around 5,000, with thousands more listening from the sloping lawn outside, where picnicking before a concert is part of the ritual.
Koussevitzky also founded the Tanglewood Music Center in 1940 as a summer academy for young professional musicians, and its students give concerts across the season. Seiji Ozawa Hall, a 1,180-seat timber-lined hall by William Rawn Associates, opened in 1994; the same practice designed the Linde Center for Music and Learning, completed in 2019, which allows the Tanglewood Learning Institute to run concerts and talks outside the summer festival.
Highlights
- Koussevitzky Music Shed of 1938, an open-sided pavilion by Eliel Saarinen
- Lawn seating on the slope outside the Shed, a Berkshires summer tradition
- Seiji Ozawa Hall of 1994, with a rear wall that opens to the lawn
- Tanglewood Music Center, a summer academy founded in 1940
