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.” […]