Features
Upgrading Tanglewood
Tanglewood Music Center will be the recipient of some $30 million in upgrades, thanks to the Boston Symphony Orchestra, that will help freshen up the Lenox, Mass., facility that celebrated its 75th anniversary last summer.
“There are buildings at Tanglewood that are pre-Civil War,” BSO managing Director Mark Volpe told the Berkshire Chamber of Commerce June 12. “Maintaining and building Tanglewood’s position as the preeminent summer festival in the United States is something I think about every day in an ever more challenging economy and in a more fractured, more cluttered marketplace.”
A high priority in addition to improving the physical facility is “securing our position in the digital age for the dissemination of music electronically,” Volpe was quoted by the Berkshire Eagle.
BSO annually stages a June-July festival at Tanglewood, including a summer institute for about 150 advanced young professionals as part of its “core mission,” according to the paper. Of the orchestra’s more than $200 million economic impact in Massachusetts, Volpe said Tanglewood is directly responsible for as much as $70 million of it.
The upgrades to the building grounds will take place over the next seven to eight years.