A winding road passing through vintage villages, rolling hills, and farmland took me to Tanglewood on Friday for a historic opening night. “We’re celebrating James Levine and the BSO,” the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s managing director, Mark Volpe, said.

It was Mr. Levine’s first engagement at Tanglewood as the orchestra’s new music director, and in the fall the orchestra begins its 125th season.

“Tanglewood was a significant factor in Mr. Levine’s decision to come to the BSO,” Mr. Volpe said. It is Tanglewood – in addition to its performances at Symphony Hall in Boston and Carnegie Hall – that makes the orchestra the fourth largest performing-arts organization in America after the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center, and the Kennedy Center.

Those who love Tanglewood put it more simply: “It’s the confluence of music and nature at the highest level,” a Lenox, Mass.-based music-lover, Caroline Taylor, wife of the singer-songwriter James Taylor, said.

“It’s the vibrancy, the excitement people feel, the smile on their faces when they listen to the music – it’s everything from the trees to the unbelievably green grass to the acoustics,” Charles Cooney, of Stockbridge and Boston, said.

Tanglewood is the primary draw for New Yorkers who support the Boston Symphony Orchestra, as the chairman-elect of the orchestra, Edward Linde, acknowledged.

“This is much more of a New York-focused location,” he said. “More people come up from New York than travel from Boston to be here.”

Mr. Linde and his wife, Joyce, were the opening night gala’s chairmen and helped pull off a top-notch evening that raised a record $403,000.

Although a Boston resident, Mr. Linde has strong ties to a well-known New Yorker: He is Mortimer Zuckerman’s partner in the real estate investment trust Boston Properties, which he serves as president and chief executive.

When did the Lindes first discover Tanglewood? “It was a long time ago,” he said. “We came out for the weekend. We stayed at a rather inexpensive hotel and picnicked on the lawn. It was just a magical, magical night.”

Boston and New York rivalries are quickly forgotten in the idyllic setting of Tanglewood. The television news executive Av Westin, who ran “20/20,” said: “We bridge the Yankees-Red Sox divide at Tanglewood, especially on a night like this when Mahler will dominate our thoughts.” Mr. Westin and his wife have been coming to Tanglewood for 30 years.

Tanglewood feels like home. “We’re all family,” the widow of the Utah Symphony conductor Maurice Abravanel, Carolyn Abravanel, said as she hugged Tanglewood’s director of facilities, Dave Sturma.

One reason Tanglewood is such a rich place is the Tanglewood Music Center, America’s premier training ground for orchestral musicians. In the sixth row of the orchestra were two summer fellows, bassoonist Brad Balliett, 22, and oboist Sarah Skuster, 20. He just graduated from Harvard and is headed to Rice University, and she is a student at the Cleveland Institute of Music. They’ll perform four concerts this summer, including an all-Wagner program conducted by Mr. Levine this Saturday.

Although it rained all day and much of the evening, the Hawthorne Tent, where cocktails and dinner were held before the concert, was dry and festive.

The decor hit that wonderful New England combination of elegant and rustic: brown-and-white-striped linens, a tangle of twig wrapped around the napkins, and peach flowers in the centerpieces. The menu was crab and corn tart, grilled veal chop, and tart filled with lemon curd and fresh, thinly sliced peaches arranged like the petals of a flower. The event was designed by the firm of Bryan Rafanelli under the direction of Billy Evers.

The people at Tanglewood are well-educated and accomplished – some are musical, some are scholars, some are titans of business – with reputations extending far beyond the Berkshire Hills, primarily in the directions of New York and Boston but sometimes nationally.

Take, for example, Phyllis Curtin, who after four decades of singing opera on the world’s best stages became a beloved teacher at Tanglewood, Yale, and Boston University. Yet, like the typical face in the crowd, she talks about world affairs as gracefully as she does music (before she became an opera singer, she studied international relations at Wellesley).

At Tanglewood you won’t find the glitter of money and fashion that sparkles in New York and the Hamptons. This is a place where smart, interested, and interesting people belong.

It’s the type of place where one concertgoer, Hortense Singer, received a million compliments on her raincoat, purchased just that afternoon in town. It was powder-blue and made of an accordion-like fabric, reminiscent of Issey Miyake. “It’s never happened to me before,” the arts patron from Chicago said.

Speaking of attire: The evenings are cool in the Berkshires, and the rain gave this one a wet chill. Guests warmed themselves in quilted Burberry jackets, fishermen’s sweaters, fleece pullovers, and wool tweed sports coats.

Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, with movements that sounded like comets and stars bursting from the sky, was a great match for the venue. More than 400 singers and musicians were on stage, including soprano Deborah Voigt and seven other soloists, with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and the American Boychoir on bleachers surrounding the orchestra.

After the concert, top-level donors joined the artists on stage for coffee and more dessert.

Couples who served as benefactor committee co-chairmen included a partner and former chairman at Dewey Ballantine, Everett Jassy, and a conducting student at Juilliard, Margery Jassy; Jane Mayer and a professor and administrator at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Robert Mayer, whose daughter Rachel Judlowe is in the architecture department at the Museum of Modern Art, and Hannah and Raymond Schneider.

The most famous locals in the crowd may have been the owners of the Red Lion Inn, Jane and Jack Fitzpatrick, who were also event co-chairmen. He is a former Massachusetts senator. The Red Lion, which they bought in 1968, is one of the few New England inns in continuous operation since 1800; its guests have included Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thornto Wilder, John Wayne, and Bob Dylan.

The guest list included the backers of an elementary school in Williamsburg, Joseph and Carol Reich; the founder of the private equity investment firm Berkshire Partners LLC, Bradley Bloom; a senior director at Goldman Sachs, Stephen Kay; the founder and president of the nonprofit Careers through Culinary Arts Program, Richard Grausman; a couple from Tulsa, Okla., Dan and Gloria Schusterman (his brother was Charles Schusterman, a generous supporter of Hillel and the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education), and the rabbis Balfour Brickner and Jack Stern (Rabbi Brickner was at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue and once made New York magazine’s list of 50 sexiest New Yorkers; Rabbi Stern was at Westchester Reform Temple). .

The president of the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, Lola Jaffe, attended with its vice chairwoman, Barbara Bonner, who worked for more than 25 years as a fund-raiser for New York City cultural institutions including the Asia Society and the Museum of the City of New York. The Mahaiwe theater, which marks its centennial this year, is under restoration in nearby Great Barrington and has scheduled a fund-raising event with the Paul Taylor Dance Company for September 17.