Every time I come to Tanglewood, there’s something memorable about the rehearsals. Like the time that James Levine forgot about one of the sopranos in the scaffolding above the stage. Or the Meistersinger rehearsal where Johan Botha and James Morris drank their between-solo water from enormous steins.
Today, there was a bear.
Partway through the beginning of one of the movements of Rossini’s Stabat Mater, there was a commotion from the lawn. At first we ignored it; then the words “a bear!” filtered through everyone’s consciousness and we all stopped for a few minutes to watch the adult black bear cut a diagonal across the lawn.
And then we kept singing, as the grounds staff deployed a pickup truck to herd the bear away. One wonders what Rossini would think.
Update: Here’s a photo of the bear wandering the Tanglewood grounds, courtesy Tom Wang.
