A whale of a tale: Inside the making of a Tanglewood-for-tots performance
Music director Allen Feinstein made a welcome but unexpected debut on the Tanglewood stage conducting a group of Boston Symphony Orchestra musicians and introducing children to the world of classical music.
When Allen Feinstein realized he would be writing a chamber music piece for the Boston Symphony Orchestra to perform at Tanglewood, it was a dream come true.
However, Feinstein didn’t expect to step onstage himself.
“I’ve had my music performed all around. I’ve had the pleasure of conducting these BSO players at Northeastern,” says Feinstein, a seasoned composer, conductor and music director of the Northeastern Symphony Orchestra. “But I’d never had the pleasure of having my own music performed at Tanglewood by BSO players where I conducted them.”
Composed for five instrumentalists and a narrator and written for young children, “A Whale of a Tale” might seem strange, but it’s the result of a long-running collaboration between Northeastern and the BSO. BSO musicians have joined the Northeastern University Wind Ensemble as guest soloists on for 15 years.
The BSO ultimately commissioned Feinstein to write a chamber music piece for the BSO’s Concerts for Very Young People. Feinstein is no stranger to writing and performing for a young audience — he relishes it — and leaped at the opportunity.
“I love [children’s] ability to imagine crazy, wild things and make sense of that. I enjoy their sense of humor,” Feinstein says. “I find it just so rewarding if I can create something that they will respond to.”
“A Whale of a Tale” came with its own array of creative challenges though. Feinstein and his BSO collaborators conceived of the piece as a half-hour program that would be interactive and focused on storytelling, including having a narrator. “A Whale of a Tale” is nautically themed and follows a young girl and her mother as they go fishing. Whales, greedy seagulls and misadventures ensue.
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What that meant for Feinstein was writing both a piece of music and a narrative that would engage children and their parents on multiple levels. He also had an unorthodox collection of five instruments to compose for that spanned the orchestral gamut from piccolo to double bass. It amounted to a “mini orchestra” that afforded him some unique creative opportunities, he says.
“When there’s a seagull and they talk about the seagull, the bassoon is making seagull sounds,” Feinstein says. “The little girl is represented by the piccolo, and the mother is represented by the violin. The other character in this, the whale, is represented by the French horn. The bass was just the ocean.”
The end result of Feinstein’s work involved carefully composed chamber music, narration featuring public radio reporter and podcaster Rebecca Sheir and a climactic singalong “mini ‘Fantasia’” that riffed on “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” It was a lot even for his musicians, Feinstein admits.
As a result, he received an unexpected Tanglewood debut and ended up conducting onstage instead of letting the musicians conduct themselves as is typical of a smaller chamber group.
“As a conductor, I felt a little silly conducting six people, but it was still an extraordinary honor and treat to do that,” Feinstein says.
There will be an even longer tale for Feinstein’s piece moving forward. The initial performance of “A Whale of a Tale” in July was so successful that the BSO now hopes to perform it throughout its 2025-2026 season as part of its Concerts for Very Young People.