With his solo rendition of “Beowulf,” coming up on Wednesday at Ozawa Hall, Benjamin Bagby may be the only musician during the Tanglewood season who will perform an entire evening without any written music. It’s not that he’s memorized a composition and left the sheet music at home. Yet the essence of his material is more than 1,000 years old. “Nothing that I’m performing is notated. I’m...

It was in the basement of a Seattle church in the early 1970s that Pleasant DeSpain knew for sure his commitment to becoming a professional storyteller was going to work out. “I had my hat by the door, and I told stories for two hours,” he says. “At the end of that night, there was $27.68 in that hat. And rent for a decent apartment was $100 back then. I knew then that there was no turning back.” DeSpain has been telling...