Good perspectives on MTT, Barry. If a musician doesn't like interacting with the public at a record store, he shouldn't be at record stores. Both sides lose. I'm posting this article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch when the San Francisco Symphony came here on tour, because of Kennicott's swipe at Blomstedt (dour?!?). It felt wrong at the time, and reading up on him since, it feels even more off base.
THE TIME OF TILSON THOMAS - WUNDERKIND BRINGS HIS BAY AREA SYMPHONY TO POWELL HALLHide Details
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MO) (Published as St. Louis Post-Dispatch) - March 11, 1996Browse Issues
Author/Byline: By Philip Kennicott; Classical Music Critic Of The Post-DispatchEdition: FIVE STAR LIFTSection: EVERYDAY MAGAZINEPage: 3DReadability: 10-12 grade level (Lexile: 1170)
Michael Tilson Thomas
and the San Francisco Symphony
Where: Powell Hall
When: 8 p.m. Tuesday
How much: $16-$59
More info: 534-1700
THE long wait is over. America's aging musical wunderkind finally has his own orchestra, and half-a-lifetime's imposed wanderlust has come to an end in San Francisco.
In 1993, Michael Tilson Thomas was appointed the new music director of the San Francisco Symphony; in September his tenure began. On Tuesday night, he brings his new band to St. Louis' Powell Hall.
The San Francisco Symphony's tour is both an introduction of the new musical marriage and a victory tour of sorts for the conductor.
Although Tilson Thomas has had a busy and productive musical career since 1969 when, at the age of 24, he was appointed assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, it is a career that has progressed in fits and starts, with unexpected setbacks and, until now, few clear-cut triumphs.
When the young conductor arrived in Boston, his dynamic style and precocious musical understanding prompted comparisons with Leonard Bernstein.
But while Bernstein's musical ascent was precipitous and lasting, Tils on Thomas' has been slow and, at times, tenuous.
Although gracious and charismatic when he speaks from the stage, Tilson Thomas has a notoriously volatile personality; that, combined with a lifestyle that was perceived by many in the '70s and '80s as reckless, led to difficulties securing a full-time post worthy of his talents.
Tilson Thomas now has a post worthy of him, and his arrival in San Francisco seems a natural.
"I am the happiest I've ever been," says Tilson Thomas from San Francisco. "We're having a great time out here, the orchestra, the community. There is a great coming together, a coalescing of the orchestra and the many different constituencies in the community. It's working."
After years under Herbert Blomstedt, a brilliant conductor but a dour public presence, Tilson Thomas' tenure at the San Francisco Symphony has sparked a media blitz in his new home town.
His face looms large from billboards around the Bay Area, and he has become an instant civic celebrity.
His strong ideas about new repertoire and American music have instantly transformed the orchestra's artistic profile, and the city's audience seems ready for the change.
And while the orchestra's recording profile was high under Blomstedt, who left a critically acclaimed Sibelius cycle on London Records, Tilson Thomas has brought the orchestra an important five year, 15-recording contract from BMG.
At first glance, Tilson Thomas' current tour might seem a bit premature. He is, after all, offering for national scrutiny an orchestra with whom he has only worked full-time since September. But as he points out, his relationship with the San Francisco as a guest conductor has a long history.
"We've worked together in one form or another for donkey's years," says Tilson Thomas. "This was more like a homecoming for me after all the guest conducting, and we are getting it together very quickly. Naturally there were certain anxieties, and it is still taking a chance (to tour so soon), but I knew by the time we played the Prokofiev ("Romeo and Juliet" Suite, recently recorded on BMG) early in the season that we had it all in place. We're building on all our past work."
The one virtue of Tilson Thomas' belated arrival at a major American post is the breadth of experience he brings immediately to his role.
He arrives with the major repertory - Mahler, Beethoven and Ives are some of his specialities - fully digested. He also brings plenty of experience heading major orchestras, including years as the artistic director of the New World Symphony, a first-class training ensemble based in Florida, and as principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. He's clearly mastered the difficult multiple roles of musician, administrator, fund-raiser and figure head.
"It's like taking over General Motors," he says of his new responsibilities. "There is a huge administrative part to the job. It's the kind of thing you can only do when you really have a great back log of repertoire. And while it's essential to do new repertoire - we're doing a lot of it in the coming seasons - you also have to be sensitive to the burden on the orchestra, and not overwhelm them. It's a matter of balance."
Tilson Thomas is lucky, it seems, to have found an orchestra in which that balance can be pushed toward the unfamiliar. In June he leads the group on a two-week festival of American music, covering everything from John Cage and Henry Cowell to Copland and Bernstein; next season features a Gerswhin and Stravinsky festival.
When asked about his interest in American repertoire and his new opportunity to explore it in depth, Tilson Thomas sounds historically self-conscious.
"There's no doubt in my mind that American music will be one of the most powerful streams in music, comparable to Russian music in the early part of this century," says the conductor who is also a composer. "So many 20th-century musical ideas have come through American music, its vernacular and cultural traditions. There is a kind of merging of these musical streams that is going on."
Tilson Thomas own tastes remain unpredictable and eclectic.
"The most important American composers were the mavericks," he says. "Although we had a group of very distinguished cultural icons, composers with a more intellectual and cerebral front, ultimately it was the ground breakers, the eccentrics that we produced. People as diverse as Ives and Gerswhin and Copland, Lou Harrison, John Cage and Steve Reich."
And his own aesthetic tends to the more directly expressive voices.
"I began very much in the avant-garde, but I've become more traditional over the years. The actual notes must express something, the piece has gestures, it takes me on some kind of emotional journey. We are learning more and more about the structure of the brain, the way it schematizes sound. And it suggests that there are certain set parameters within the way we can hear music."
The program Tilson Thomas brings to St. Louis is a kind of personal resume of his musical interests and talents. The orchestra will perform Mahler's "Symphony No. 5" and Copland's "Symphonic Ode."
Of the Copland, the conductor says with typical concision and enthusiasm: "You'll never hear "Copland's Ode" like this - it is a bridge between Mahler's Tenth and St. Louis blues."
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