Michael Tilson Thomas and S.F. Symphony have been a partnership for the ages

Feb 6, 2024

By Joshua Kosman
San Francisco Chronicle

The San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas spent 50 years making music together, 25 of them with him as the orchestra’s music director. For those of us who lived through this era, it can sometimes feel too easy to take this fact for granted, as if it were simply the natural course of events.

But it wasn’t. It was a gift, and an extraordinarily rare one.

The number of partnerships between an American orchestra and a music director that have been so productive for so long is vanishingly small, to the point where it’s easy to list them off the top of your head: Serge Koussevitzky in Boston, Eugene Ormandy in Philadelphia, George Szell in Cleveland and Georg Solti in Chicago.

These are the pairings for which the identity of conductor and orchestra merged so thoroughly that speaking of one meant speaking of the other. In each case, their artistic personalities were a single joint creation, designed and crafted by the conductor, and forged out of the raw materials that the musicians contributed.

That’s the honor roll in which Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony — uniquely over the last half century — can claim a place.

Today was not the day I had ever hoped to make these observations. Thomas made his San Francisco debut in 1974, and although five decades of performances have given local audiences a musical bounty almost beyond imagining, it hasn’t been enough. We should have had more.

The three concerts on Jan 25-27 devoted to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, though, were designated as the last subscription program with Thomas on the podium. Since his diagnosis in 2021 with brain cancer, he has returned to Davies Symphony Hall again and again, defying expectations with stirring performances of Mahler’s Sixth and Beethoven’s Ninth symphonies.

If we’re very fortunate, we may yet have another opportunity to hear these musicians working together on an ad hoc basis. For now, though, this partnership — arguably the most consequential in the orchestra’s 113-year history — has officially come to an end. So it’s a good time to outline and celebrate the scope of Thomas’ achievements.

Read the full article.

In a Touching Farewell, Michael Tilson Thomas Savors Every Moment of Mahler’s Fifth

Jan 27, 2024

By Gabe Meline
KQED

Michael Tilson Thomas was in a good mood. […]

While leading a richly rewarding performance of Mahler’s Fifth — a program that repeats Friday and Saturday — a beaming grin was present on his face. Evidently, he needed this music as much as the music needed him. […]

Mahler composed the Fifth Symphony in 1901–1902, and it’s often credited with ushering in 20th century composition. Deeply evocative, it fits nearly every human emotion into 75 minutes. It zig-zags from theme to theme, presenting soft timpani and pizzicatos along with thundering, full-throated brass passages.

On Thursday, in the hands of Thomas — who made his conducting debut with the San Francisco Symphony 50 years ago, with Mahler’s Ninth — every few minutes yielded a new delight, from its alluring first measures to its thrilling ending.

Once or twice during the music, one noticed his health as he steadied himself by grasping his left hand on the podium. His conducting retained its rhythm, even if it lessened in dynamism; he rarely called for volume adjustments, or vigorously punctuated key moments. At one climactic downbeat in the first movement, the strings, brass and tympani all landed just a millisecond off from each other.

But this is Mahler. Every cell in Thomas’ body knows this music. The orchestra does, too, and rose to the occasion — especially in the beloved Adagietto, one of Mahler’s most heart-wrenching pieces of music. (Thomas’ mentor, Leonard Bernstein, so loved it that he was reportedly buried with the score.)

It was during the Adagietto that I couldn’t help but meditate on Thomas’ long history here. Personally, I thought back to first seeing him at Davies in 1995, conducting Stravinsky with violin prodigy Midori; again in 2001, valiantly conducting Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 one day after 9/11; and in 2015, premiering the groundbreaking SoundBox series. He’s inspired multiple generations in the Bay Area (the Mahler vinyl bins at Amoeba Music are, as of this writing, completely sold out), and is indelibly woven into the cultural fabric of San Francisco.

After the piece’s rousing finale — before the audience spilled out onto the newly christened “MTT Way” — Thomas stood for a seven-minute standing ovation. It would have gone on longer, too, were it not for him theatrically sighing and miming to the enthusiastic crowd that it was time to drink milk and go to bed, drawing laugher among the cheers.

As if to console anyone with tears in their eyes at this celebration of life and an incredible career, for a second, at least, the message was: don’t be sad.

Review: Michael Tilson Thomas bids a bittersweet farewell with — of course — Mahler

Jan 26, 2024

By Joshua Kosman
San Francisco Chronicle

Sometimes it seems as if the music of Gustav Mahler has been the recurrent soundtrack of our lives in the Bay Area.

With Michael Tilson Thomas leading the San Francisco Symphony, time after time and year after year, these resplendent orchestral works have informed our world with their wisdom, their pathos and their ability to make time stand still.

So it was more than fitting — it was practically preordained — that the composer’s Fifth Symphony was the music to close the book on Thomas’ galvanizing 50-year history with this orchestra, as guest conductor, music director and now music director laureate. […]

The emotions flowed back and forth, from stage to audience and back again. The music intimated secrets to us about time, love and mortality, and we caught those emanations and made them our own. Thomas, as he has done for so many years in so many ways, made it all happen, in partnership with his longtime collaborators.

For an all-too-brief 90 minutes, Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony played Mahler’s music in Davies Symphony Hall, and all was right with the world.

Read the full review.

Michael Tilson Thomas triumphs at Symphony Center in exuberant program of Brahms, Mozart

Dec 1, 2023

By Kyle MacMillan
The Chicago Sun-Times

Facing brain cancer, the renowned conductor delivered a performance that will stand up to any in this hall this season.

[…] The music director laureate of the San Francisco Symphony has been undertaking a kind of farewell tour with some of the orchestras that have meant the most to him. And so it was that he valiantly arrived Monday in Chicago for a series of rehearsals and then took the stage Thursday evening looking a bit frail but also determined and strong.

Tilson Thomas first conducted the CSO at the Ravinia Festival in 1970, and he has appeared with the ensemble on about 40 other occasions at Ravinia and in Orchestra Hall, even leading an Australian tour in 1988. It’s an extraordinary history that got another important chapter Thursday evening.

After he slowly made his way to the podium amid warm applause, he turned to the audience and put the tip of his baton to his forehead and flipped it outward in salute.

What quickly became clear is that no allowances had to be made for the circumstances. Tilson Thomas was here to work, and that’s what he did, delivering a performance that will stand up to any in this hall this season.

The evening’s crowning offering was Arnold Schoenberg’s brilliant 1937 orchestral transcription of Johannes Brahms’ Piano Quartet No 1 in G minor, Op. 25, an amalgamation of these two giant talents but very much in keeping with Brahms’ original intent.

Tilson Thomas oversaw an interpretation throbbing with energy and immediacy — the orchestra right with him as he deftly responded to the work’s ever-changing moods and feels and brought a clear-eyed clarity to the whole.

He adroitly handled the multiple themes of the work’s long, complex first movement, drawing beautiful, ideally balanced playing from the brass in its agitated, fanfare-like moments in the spotlight.

The piece ended with a wonderfully spirited take on the galloping fourth movement, nicknamed “Gypsy Rondo,” with Tilson Thomas bringing perfectly calibrated tempos and breezing through the changing rhythms and meters with ease.

Making the performance even more impressive was the conductor led it all by memory. He had the score in front of him but never consulted it. He flipped through the pages after the first movement to re-establish his place and didn’t bother after that.

The big revelation of this concert was the concert’s opener, Wolfgang Mozart’s Six German Dances, K. 509, which, amazingly, the CSO had never performed before. Debuted in Prague in 1787, this 12-minute set of short dances is a light, jocular piece with plentiful doses of Mozartean charm.

Tilson Thomas clearly has an affection for this little gem, bringing to it discipline, yes, but also simplicity, airiness and, perhaps most important, a sense of fun. Adding to the work’s delight is a series of flitting piccolo solos handled with aplomb by Jennifer Gunn, whom Tilson Thomas rightly granted an individual bow.

[…]

What most of us want when it comes to death is to go out on our terms, and that is exactly what Tilson Thomas is doing: still making superb music and following his passion.

For a little more than two hours, he transcended the bounds of mortal earth and took a roomful of grateful listeners with him.

An emotion-laden return to Davies Symphony Hall

Oct 22, 2023

By Joshua Kosman
San Francisco Chronicle

In his first concert as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, in September 1995, Michael Tilson Thomas led the orchestra in a dynamic, revelatory performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It was an unforgettable experience, one that established the pattern for the 25 years of musical adventure that followed.

Beethoven’s Ninth was on the agenda once again Thursday, Oct. 19, when Thomas, now the orchestra’s Music Director Laureate, returned for what seems all too likely to be his final appearance with the orchestra.

It was a rich and emotion-laden occasion, at once an encounter with a familiar musical masterpiece and an opportunity for music lovers in the Bay Area and elsewhere to pay tribute to the man who has given us so many of these over the years.

[…]as soon as the playing began, the old mastery reasserted itself. Making music is like breathing for Thomas; with the baton in his hand, he seemed to expand, both visibly and audibly, into his fullest and most fluent self. 

That was true most gloriously in the symphony’s slow movement, which required less physical exertion and more expressive sensitivity. The movement’s lyrical melodies wove themselves in and out of the texture, as Thomas guided them with a light but effective touch. There were wondrous emphases in the phrasing — at times novel, at times poised to land just as expected — and a sumptuous quality to the movement’s overall shape. […]

LSO/Tilson Thomas/Tetzlaff review – Brahms soars and glows

May 25, 2023

By Erica Jeal
The Guardian

In an all-Brahms programme, Christian Tetzlaff brought momentum and shape to the Violin Concerto, and Tilson Thomas made every note glow

There is a sense that every concert the London Symphony Orchestra gets to give with its conductor laureate, Michael Tilson Thomas, is now a gift – this evening of Brahms came a little over a year after the announcement that he was being treated for an aggressive form of brain cancer. Yet if Tilson Thomas’s own dynamic energy now needs to be husbanded to some extent, this did not translate into any loss of momentum or intensity in the orchestra’s performance: small gestures – a lean towards the cellos here, a shimmy of the fingers to fade out the brass there – were enough to shape the music into the kind of long, elastic lines that make Brahms’s notes glow.

Michael Tilson Thomas — why brain cancer won’t stop me conducting

May 19, 2023

By Richard Morrison
The Times

The esteemed American conductor on carrying on, the LSO and the future of classical music.

[… MTT] has always seen the conductor’s role as encouraging, not dictating. “I guess that’s because I come from a theatrical family, not a musical one,” he says. He is alluding to his grandparents, Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, star performers in Manhattan’s early 20th-century Yiddish theatre scene. “So very early in my life I saw that the best results were not achieved by directors who gave actors specific readings of each line. Good actors detest the ‘say it like this’ approach. Much better just to indicate a general direction and let them build on that. It’s the same with the principal players in an orchestra.”

Tilson Thomas admits, however, that age and experience make it much easier for a conductor to strike a balance between controlling everything and controlling nothing. “The problem for a young conductor doing a famous symphony with a top orchestra is that it’s like a young director being hired to do Hamlet with great actors who have all done their parts many times before. What are you going to tell them that they haven’t already thought of, already tried and probably discarded because it doesn’t work?”

How did the young Tilson Thomas manage that? “Those early days were all about survival, so I developed some strategies,” he replies. “If senior players in the orchestra queried an idea I had, I would say: ‘Wasn’t it Furtwängler who asked for it to be done this way?’ The answer was no. I had just made it up. But they didn’t know that.”

One of those orchestras was the LSO, which, in the 1970s, had a ferocious reputation for chewing up conductors it didn’t respect. “Of all the top orchestras in the world,” Tilson Thomas says, “the LSO is the one to which I would apply that phrase ‘whatever is at hand, they take care of business very quickly’. There is no request a conductor can make, however dilcult or obscure, that they cannot achieve nearly instantaneously. But in those days that came with a certain impatience. They weren’t keen on going on, shall we say, gentle voyages of discovery with a young conductor.”

Nevertheless, Tilson Thomas and the LSO hit it off. It has been his go-to orchestra in London for almost 50 years. “Well, apart from a brief hiatus when the record companies — you remember record companies? — were playing some sort of contractual dance and I worked for a bit with the Philharmonia.”

He remembers his first LSO engagement vividly. “Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements was on the programme, and I was astounded that from the first downbeat in rehearsal the LSO played it with incredible energy and precision. I had conducted the piece elsewhere, but never encountered anything like this.

“But then we got to the last rehearsal, and suddenly it all sounded deflated and muted. So I shouted: ‘Come on, guys! Let’s get going!’ Whereupon the LSO’s principal oboist, a wonderfully distinguished, very English gentleman called Roger Lord, raised his hand and said: “Young man, would you like the performance now, or perhaps some time later this evening?’ It was a lesson I’ve never forgotten.” […]

The Ageless Exuberance of Michael Tilson Thomas

Feb 5, 2023

By Alex Ross
The New Yorker

In the face of serious illness, the conductor led two memorable programs at the L.A. Phil.

The molten monument that is Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is routinely described as the work of a man facing imminent death. It took shape in the summer of 1909, two years after Mahler was given a diagnosis of rheumatic heart disease. Leonard Bernstein liked to argue that the strange, staggered pulse of the opening bars replicates symptoms of Mahler’s condition. The immense emotional range of the symphonic narrative that ensues—desperate longing, false triumph, vertiginous collapse, desolate meandering, damaged nostalgia, rancid rage, full-throated lament—finds resolution in twenty-seven legendarily transcendent bars for strings alone. The markings tell the story: adagissimo (as slow as possible), mit inniger Empfindung (with deep feeling), aüsserst langsam (extremely slow), ersterbend (dying away). Mahler died in 1911, with his Tenth Symphony unfinished.

The trouble with doom-laden readings of the Ninth—for Bernstein, it presaged not only its composer’s death but also “the death of tonality . . . the death of music itself . . . the death of society, of our Faustian culture”—is that Mahler’s entire œuvre dwells on mortality. If he had died at any earlier stage, his music could have been said to foretell his demise just as clearly. Furthermore, as the Mahler biographer Henry-Louis de La Grange argued, the composer’s mood after the diagnosis was far from hopeless. In a 1908 letter to his younger colleague Bruno Walter, Mahler wrote that, although he sensed something amiss in his heartbeat, he was not consumed by a “hypochondriacal fear of death.” Instead, he felt as though he were undergoing a metamorphosis: “At the end of a life, I must learn once again to walk and stand like a beginner.”

That sentence passed through my mind when, in mid-January, the Los Angeles Philharmonic gave a technically flawless, emotionally charged performance of the Ninth at Disney Hall. The conductor was Michael Tilson Thomas, who, after decades of eternal boyishness, is now an elder sage of the profession. In the summer of 2021, Tilson Thomas learned that he had glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer. His prognosis is considerably more dire than the one Mahler faced in 1907. As Tilson Thomas walked to the podium, I wondered whether he would address the audience. He is known as one of our more talkative conductors, and no one there would have begrudged him some remarks—particularly since he was born in Los Angeles, seventy-eight years ago.

Yet he remained silent, acknowledging the crowd with a couple of bows and a friendly wave of the hand. His interpretation of Mahler’s valediction gave little sign of being weighed down by Bernsteinian baggage. It was, to be sure, quite slow, extending well past the ninety-minute mark; but Tilson Thomas always tends to take his time in Mahler, as is evident in his recorded cycle with the San Francisco Symphony, which he led from 1995 to 2020. This was a spacious, nuanced, sumptuously colored account of the Ninth, free of excess angst or frenzy. The work came across less as an interior drama than as an exterior landscape of mountainous vastness, its catastrophes more seismic than psychic.

The final Adagio stopped time, for a full half hour. Rather than try to wring meaning from every phrase, Tilson Thomas seemed content to maintain his hypnotic slow beat and let the strings bask in the golden-hour harmony. The coda was eerily calm, with phrases, chords, and single notes suspended like thin brushstrokes on a white canvas. Tilson Thomas has long admired the modernist master Morton Feldman, who composed at the edge of silence. The final page of the Ninth came across, enthrallingly, as a prophecy of Feldman, of music’s future. Without words, Tilson Thomas was teaching one more lesson through the music that he loves.

Load more

Stay in Touch

Newsletter

Social Media