Michael Tilson Thomas, who passed away on April 23, was one of the most significant figures in the American music scene for over 50 years. His impact was felt at the start of his important conducting career in the late ’60s and only grew in value and significance from then on. His was perhaps the most powerful voice advocating for 20th-century American music since that of his role model, Leonard Bernstein. His programming was fresh and innovative, his interpretations the result of a fresh rethinking of each score being performed, and his performances precise reflections of his ideas.
I first heard Tilson Thomas conduct in January 1971 after he had become associate conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the age of 26. It was at the orchestra’s appearance in the Philharmonic Hall (now the David Geffen Hall) in New York, and the program reflected his particular programming interests: Webern’s Op. 6 orchestra pieces (at the time thought to be a daring challenge for symphony audiences); a Bach Brandenburg Concerto (not usually included among mixed orchestral repertoire); a saxophone concertino by Tilson Thomas’ friend and mentor Ingolf Dahl; and Debussy’s Images for orchestra, reflecting the conductor’s predilection for French music.
At this early stage, the program demonstrated some of Tilson Thomas’ life-long interests: “cutting edge” modern repertory (Webern), important but under-served mid-century American voices (Dahl), varied and unusual programming combinations (Bach), and colorful orchestration requiring precise rhythms and balances (Debussy). Ron Barron, who was newly arrived in the trombone section at the time, described Tilson Thomas to me as a “wunderkind,” and imagining this tall skinny kid enthusiastically waving a stick at venerable orchestra members, including members who had been there since the days of Koussevitsky, provides an appropriate visual picture. Barron indicated that Tilson Thomas was passed over to succeed the outgoing William Steinberg as principal conductor in favor of the somewhat older Seiji Ozawa, probably owing to a certain brashness in the presumptive heir to the Bernstein legacy. Meanwhile, the recordings that he made with the BSO remain classics, often unmatched in American repertoire. His 1971 recordings of Ives’ “Three Places in New England,” Ruggles’ “Suntreader,” Piston’s Symphony No. 2, and William Schuman’s Violin Concerto remain unmatched, at least until his remakes (of the first two with the San Francisco Symphony). His recordings of the five Ives symphonies (counting the “Holidays”) are equally definitive. More about that later.
Tilson Thomas went on to a distinguished and multi-faceted career, leading the Buffalo Symphony from 1971 to 1979. This orchestra had a tradition of innovation inherited from its previous director, Lukas Foss. Tilson Thomas recorded all the orchestral works of Carl Ruggles, much of Ives, and Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” (playing piano and conducting). This last was used in the soundtrack to Woody Allen’s film “Manhattan.” He went on to conduct the London Symphony in the 1980s. He also created his “New World Symphony” in 1987 for aspiring professionals that was the incubator for generations of orchestra players. He finally “graduated” to the San Francisco Symphony in 1995, where he remained for the next 25 years. He became the most articulate spokesperson for classical music since Leonard Bernstein, creating a series of videos explaining and demystifying basic repertory in a way that is accessible to lay listeners.
In 2002, I was teaching a class on Charles Ives at Simon’s Rock and saw that Tilson Thomas was conducting his Fourth Symphony in Carnegie Hall. I immediately arranged for the class to travel to New York City to hear it. This is one of the most complex and difficult works in the entire symphonic repertory, premiered 40 years after it was composed. I have heard many performances, including that premier in 1965 (led by Stokowski), but Tilson Thomas was the first conductor who made complete musical and expressive sense out of the work. He knew what each detail was there for, from the barely audible background strings (sometimes playing in microtones) to the three spatially separated groups playing simultaneously. He had one such group playing at the back of the Family Circle (up behind the nose-bleed seats), another playing under the stage, and sections of the orchestra spread about the stage with a chorus at the rear and a piano in the front. The score seems at times chaotic (especially in the second movement) and often comes off as random noise, but not here: It emerged with hallucinatory clarity and meaningful, deeply spiritual expressiveness. The end of the fourth movement, the choir’s singing of “Nearer My God to Thee” receding into the distance along with the perpetual soft ticking clock of the under-stage percussion, offered a profoundly spiritual experience, one that demonstrated the total identification of conductor, composer, and score. The students in the class had never experienced anything like it and literally floated out of the concert hall.
Tilson Thomas’ work with younger players was on optimal display when he led the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in a Leonard Bernstein memorial concert in the summer of 2010. The program was Mahler’s huge Symphony No. 3 (the only item on the program), and for the occasion it took place in the Shed. What was memorable about the performance was the obvious delight he took in the young players’ enthusiasm and creative individuality. He led the work (especially the first movement) as a grand street festival, full of the multi-cultural energy of marching bands, klezmer musicians, bird calls, and general wildness, all within the framework of the score’s mammoth architecture. He pulled off the trick of of capturing and coordinating that wild energy to present an ultimately coherent view of Mahler’s Dionysian score.
I caught up with Tilson Thomas again at Carnegie Hall on March 28, 2012, when he brought his California orchestra to New York for a run-out of a festival called “American Mavericks,” described on its website as “a slate of concerts and special events focusing on the voices who created a new American sound for the twentieth century and beyond.”
The names of the composers reflect his ongoing advocacy for modern and contemporary American voices: Ives, Copland, Lou Harrison, Carl Ruggles, Edgard Varese, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Meredith Monk, Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, Terry Riley, Morton Subotnick, Lukas Foss, David Del Tredici, Steve Reich, John Adams, and Mason Bates. I cannot think of another conductor who would have the knowledge of such a range of non-standard and challenging repertoire to be able to present all this within a single month. The concert I attended included “Sun-treader” (by now a Tilson Thomas standard); Feldman’s “Piano and Orchestra” with Emmanuel Ax, one of the most original, moving, and sheerly beautiful pieces I have encountered, performed with loving care by all concerned; and Henry Brant’s orchestration of Ives’ Concord Sonata titled (and later recorded as) “Concord Symphony.” I have always thought this transcription somewhat misguided, as the original is powerfully effective as a virtuoso solo piano piece whose impact is diluted when the performing duties are diffused through 80-plus musicians. Nevertheless, as the work of another important American music innovator, it represented the ongoing “maverick” (i.e., nonconformist) tradition to which Tilson Thomas had such a deep connection. This was a well-performed program doing full justice to each work.
Then there was that final pair of weekend concerts that concluded the summer of 2022 at Tanglewood. At the time, we knew that Tilson Thomas had undergone surgery for brain cancer, and his physical presence on the podium seemed subdued and more economical of gesture, which did not seem to affect his performances. The first program included a powerful rendition of the iconic “great American symphony,” Copland’s Third. This work is extremely challenging for the orchestra, especially the brass. (I have heard it mangled several times, including by Leonard Bernstein.) It requires great clarity to keep Copland’s multi-layered syncopations lined up properly and great energy to mobilize the sometimes fully loaded orchestral textures while maintaining textural clarity and forward momentum. Tilson Thomas accomplished all of this to great effect, and in a moving gesture acknowledging the subsequent ovation, he held up in front of him a copy of the score.
The weekend culminated in the first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth that I have heard since 1960 that had something truly new and insightful to say about this over-played (and sometimes over-sold) masterpiece. In my Berkshire Edge review of that performance, I wrote:
In the scherzo, the pace was a bit on the deliberate side, offering weight and a darker-than-usual tone to what is already a demonic mood. This served to highlight the contrast with the trio in a remarkable way: the conversation among solo winds (gorgeously played) started almost naively with oboe and bassoon in counterpoint and built with the addition of the other winds to a multi-colored flowing fabric of individual voices in ideal harmony, tapering off as if receding into a pastoral distance where it might be continuing perpetually (as suggested by its return later in the movement). The theme, a rising and falling scale asymmetrically phrased, anticipates the ‘folk-theme’ of the [final] Ode. Such thoughts and images were aroused by the conductor’s careful management of the musical flow over all four movements, supported by a clear-eyed creative vision of a much-played work that is easy to take for granted.
I then added, in relation to the finale: “ultimately Tilson Thomas’s lean and transparent approach sustained the build-up to the ecstatic final moments, rendering them all the more powerful.” The themes of earthiness, coherence, effective large-scale design, and drama foreshadowed in the trio are confirmed, witnesses to Tilson Thomas’ faith that the music he performed in whatever style or genre spoke to an underlying universal humanity, not just in the message of Beethoven’s Ninth but in the career of this deeply human musician.
