Click on the play button above to hear Boston Public Schools students recorded at Tanglewood — including a rendition of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God.)”
As summer season at Tanglewood entered full swing, dozens of Boston Public Schools students boarded a bus and headed west for a day trip.
They were part of the Boston Symphony Orchestra's Days in the Arts program. They participated in workshops related to music, theater and the visual arts alongside professional artists and members of the BSO.
“I learned that, first of all, Tanglewood is very far away,” said Dania Cortez Bogdanovskaya, 11, a 6th grader at the Joseph P. Manning Elementary School in Jamaica Plain. “And I learned that it existed at all. I thought it was just like a little place, not like a whole town and stuff.”
Oscar Lapham, a 13-year-old 8th grader at Boston Latin Academy, said his band teacher mentioned the annual festival.
“It's all outdoors, and I like that you can hear the music from anywhere,” Lapham said. “When they're playing the music, you can hear it like all over."
In the theater group, an instructor led the group through an exercise in which they ran across a circle waving their arms in the air whenever someone said “freak out.”
“The theater group is a bit dramatic, but that's kind of to be expected,” said Tallula Sullivan, 13, an 8th grader at Boston Latin School. “It's fun. When I'm performing in front of a lot of people it's more nerve wracking, even if I know that, I might be one of the better actors up there, maybe. But at the beginning, it's like, well, what if I'm not? I don't immediately have confidence in myself. But if I go on, I can just sink more and more into character and think about it less.”
Cortez Bogdanovskaya described learning how to make art prints, sketching a drawing onto a piece of foam so it’s engraved into it, then rolling ink onto the foam and transferring the image onto a piece of paper.
“It looks really cool,” Cortez Bogdanovskaya said. “Also, I learned different things about the instruments. Like earlier today we listened to a bassoon.”
That was a lesson from Suzanne Nelsen, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s second bassoonist. She had shown students all the different parts of her instrument and demonstrated playing it.
“Usually I'm here all summer,” Nelsen said. “As soon as my kids are out of school I move out here, because it's just magic.”
Visiting students are a special highlight, Nelsen said.
“It's lovely. I love — it's one of my favorite things to do,” Nelsen said. “I think it's one of the most important things that we can do as orchestra musicians, because they will not know what we do unless there's that kind of interaction.”
Jade Rese, 13, an 8th grader at the John D. O'Bryant School of Math and Science, has performed her whole life — on stage, in choirs, in dance.
“I've always been on some type of stage doing something, and I just love doing that type of stuff,” Rese said. “I don't really get to travel out of Boston that often. So being able to come here and be able to see orchestras, everyone perform, that's been really cool.”
