Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic

Mahler’s Eighth Symphony has been a source of difficulty for Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony for years now, the one work in the composer’s canon that seemed determined to elude their grasp. As one work after another emerged in glory from the orchestra’s long-term recording project, this one drew postponements and not-quite-ready concert performances.

Well, that’s all over now.

On Wednesday night in Davies Symphony Hall, with the microphones on and the tape rolling, Thomas led a huge army of instrumentalists, vocal soloists and choristers both young and old - the Eighth’s sobriquet “Symphony of a Thousand” is an exaggeration, but not by much - in a breathtakingly great performance of this fiendishly difficult score.

It was a high point of this concert season, and the most assured and exciting live Mahler the orchestra has offered in years. If even some of the grandeur, clarity and specificity of Wednesday’s concert can be captured on disc, this promises to be a triumphant capstone to the entire cycle.

A success this comprehensive is impossible without contributions from all concerned. The orchestra produced its most robust and evocative playing in months, and the Symphony Chorus - attaining new heights under the leadership of Ragnar Bohlin - sang with unparalleled vigor. This performance also boasts the first truly flawless lineup of vocal soloists the Eighth has yet had in San Francisco.

But the most definitive credit for this coup goes to Thomas, who presided over his forces with a combination of firm mastery and responsive sensitivity. More than in any recent performance, Thomas seemed to have taken the full 90-minute measure of this piece and plotted it out with unerring care.

And if ever a piece needed wrangling, it is Mahler’s Eighth, a behemoth that constantly threatens to slip its bonds. Each of the two panels in this diptych presents its own set of challenges, and fitting them together coherently is the third piece of the puzzle.

The opening movement, a setting of the medieval Latin hymn “Veni, creator spiritus,” is a maximally dense exercise in virtuoso counterpoint, with many strands operating at once in close proximity. That is followed by a long, varied and theatrical setting of the final scene from Goethe’s “Faust.”

The problems for a conductor are obvious. They involve keeping the first movement from collapsing into itself like some musical black hole, and connecting the potentially episodic structure of the second movement.

That Thomas was more than equal to the challenge was clear from the symphony’s opening minutes. The first measures, an explosive fireball of sound that imparts formative energy to everything that comes afterward, were thrilling, but that wasn’t the hard part.

Rather, it was the clarity and vividness of the ensuing 30 minutes that stood out. With the orchestra, and especially the first and second violins, spread out across vast distances on the Davies stage, Mahler’s intricate counterpart - like Bach on steroids - emerged with unprecedented transparency.

You could hear the almost physical impact of Mahler’s writing in the most close-knit passages. But through it all there was also a vein of seductive lyricism that rarely makes it past those big sonorities.

After disentangling the sonic snarls of the first movement, Thomas went on to stitch together the potentially disparate strands of the second. Even for devotees of Goethe’s fragrant eschatology, this succession of one vocal solo and choral section after another can often seem to meander; but Thomas kept the rhythmic and dramatic momentum running steadily throughout the movement.

Perhaps most impressively, Thomas made his audience hear the coiled power of the first movement as the source of that energy. Even with a longish gap between the two movements, there was a link between them - of sensibility, of emotional impact, of kinetic charge - that I’ve never heard expressed so palpably.

None of that would have been possible without the efforts of the Symphony Chorus, whose singing - mighty and volcanic in the first movement, celestially radiant in the second - was a constant source of wonder. The Pacific Boychoir, led by Kevin Fox, and the San Francisco Girls Chorus, led by Susan McMane, made luminous contributions as well.

And the lineup of vocal soloists was nothing short of magnificent. Sopranos Erin Wall and Elza van den Heever led the contingent with bright, piercing tones and uncannily precise intonation.

Mezzo-sopranos Katarina Karnéus and Yvonne Naef - their singing earthily provocative and darkly elegant, respectively - handled the lower reaches. The male contingent, all of them superb, included tenor Anthony Dean Griffey, baritone Quinn Kelsey and bass James Morris. And near the end, soprano Laura Claycomb appeared in the balcony to sing the few lines of the Mater Gloriosa with seraphic intensity.

Mahler’s Eighth is a weighty and often exhausting undertaking, but a performance this fine is an exhilarating thing. When it was over, I, for one, was ready for an encore.

SAN FRANCISCO—Michael Tilson Thomas will do whatever it takes to bring people into the music. The silver-maned music director of the San Francisco Symphony has invited the Grateful Dead and Metallica to perform with his orchestra. He has posed in leather garb by the Golden Gate Bridge. In a rehearsal this fall, with sweat trickling down his face, he stood up and pantomimed an ice skater gliding across the ice. “I’d like it to settle down into a sleigh-ride rhythm,” he told his musicians later as they fine-tuned a Prokofiev piece. “Like ice skating over a sleigh ride—it needs to be smoother and lighter.” He paused for a moment, letting the idea sink in. “Try it, try it,” he said. “Maybe it’s terrible. We’ll find out.”

There is more to conducting than just waving a baton. But many old-school maestros have famously struggled with the subtler requirements of the job, whether it is putting their musical vision into words, haggling with the board over the budget, or, well, making their music appeal to more than traditionalist snobs. Not Thomas, who is known in classical music circles for his charming, boyish willingness to use any metaphor—and try just about anything—in his efforts to exuberantly reinterpret classical music. “Most conductors have modeled themselves on traditional authority figures—the major general, the high priest, the chairman of the board,” says Thomas, who is often referred to by his initials, MTT. “I think my persona is a little unusual.”

No one doubts that. Heralded at age 24 as the next Leonard Bernstein, Thomas has embraced his reputation as a musical maverick. After struggling, at first, with the wunderkind label—as a young conductor, he sometimes squabbled with older musicians over his musical vision—he was passed over by symphonies in Boston and Los Angeles. He spent his formative conducting years in Buffalo and London. When he finally took over his first elite American orchestra in San Francisco in 1995, at age 50, he seemed to relish shaking it out of its conservative ways. He charmed audiences by filling programs not just with Mozart and Beethoven but with contemporary American composers like Bernstein and Aaron Copland, favorites of a younger, hipper crowd. “There is a little element of rock star in him,” says Scott Pingel, the orchestra’s principal bassist. Bill Bennett, the principal oboist, adds: “To blend this staid tradition we’re in and this kind of ‘over the footlights’ mass entertainment is a tough thing to do. But somehow he always manages to do it.”

Bucking a trend. Thomas’s unflinchingly unconventional approach has won over not just his musicians but a widely expanding audience as well. “I knew he was a great conductor,” says Nancy Bechtle, the symphony’s former president. “I just had no idea how San Franciscans would just adore him.” Ticket sales have climbed steadily since he arrived, while the average age of concert-goers, bucking a national trend, has dropped from 57 in 1992 to 55 today. “What’s unique about what Michael is doing [is] it’s done with ego checked at the door,” says Yo-Yo Ma, a frequent soloist with the symphony. “The priorities are absolutely in the right order. It’s about the music.”

Thomas’s mission, as he sees it, is simple. He wants to broaden his art form’s appeal, and he is advancing on all fronts. After a series of successful recordings, the San Francisco Symphony now has its own record label. The Miami-based New World Symphony, a training orchestra for young musicians Thomas founded in the 1980s, has grown into an elite farm team, of sorts, for the classical world. Thomas has also led the innovative multimedia effort “Keeping Score,” which has expanded his visibility through behind-the-music websites, TV, and radio programs featuring Thomas doing what he does best—cheerfully articulating his ideas about classical music.

Sitting in his office backstage after rehearsal, Thomas waves away the notion that making classical music more accessible necessarily requires leaving its traditions behind. “I’m trying to mix it up,” he says. “If it were always the same, it wouldn’t be interesting.” If that means using sleigh-ride metaphors to draw out his musicians, so be it. If it means interviewing James Brown or comparing Brian Wilson to Stravinsky, as he has done in recent radio programs, more’s the better. “If I had to say, ‘Who am I going to impress from here onward? Am I going to be playing for the experts or the guys at the gym?’ I’ll pick the guys at the gym,” Thomas says. “I want them to feel there is something in this music for them. You don’t have to know anything special to love classical music. If you are alive and in tune with your own feelings and the way in which those feelings are changing all the time, then classical music is for you.”

Call it enlightened self-interest. Call it love of the music. Michael Tilson Thomas is doing all he can to keep his classical art form alive and well.

by Joshua Kosman

Never mind aspiring to join the pantheon of notable conductors. Michael Tilson Thomas is about to be ushered into the even more hallowed ranks of the top hat, the thimble and the Scottish terrier.

A new edition of Miami Monopoly, scheduled for release today, includes a 1 1/4-inch-high pewter figure of Thomas - who conducts the New World Symphony in Miami Beach - as one of the game tokens. Evidently the original design gave him a baton, but that part kept breaking off during the race toward Boardwalk - or, as it’s called in this edition, Ocean Drive.

Monopoly fans can pass Ocean Drive and collect $200 — the greater Miami area has its own version of the famous real-estate game.

BY TANIA VALDEMORO

Never mind the $150 million that the New World Symphony is hoping to raise to build their new home. Artistic Director Michael Tilson Thomas has found a perfect spot — for just $320.

”The symphony is in a great part of town, right next to Vizcaya and halfway between going to jail or collecting $200,” Thomas said. Welcome to Monopoly: Miami and the Beaches Edition — which joins previous editions celebrating Las Vegas, New York and Boston — where houses and hotels become green bungalows and hot-pink condos, and Lincoln Road and Ocean Drive get the coveted spots typically reserved for Park Place and Boardwalk.

The game makes its debut Wednesday at the Bass Museum of Art, which is also a spot on the board.

Thomas himself is immortalized as a pewter token, his miniature figure waving a baton as if conducting a concert.

He joins a flamingo, an alligator, an airboat, a lifeguard stand and an Art Deco hotel — which replace the traditional playing pieces.

”It’s a bit daunting knowing that, at any time, I may have to outmaneuver an airboat or hurdle an alligator or race past a flamingo in the quest to buy up the city,” Thomas said.