San Francisco – The mayor of San Francisco, Daniel Lurie, had declared him Michael Tilson Thomas Day. The City Council shone in the characteristic blue of MTT. Davies Symphony Hall, where Tilson Thomas presided over San Francisco's symphony for an influential fourth century, was adorned with giant blue balloons.
For Tilson Thomas, everything was the culmination of what he declared in February: “We can all say the old commercial expression of the show, 'it is a wrap'”.
Despite starting treatment for an aggressive form of brain cancer in the summer of 2021, Tilson Thomas continued surprisingly driving in the United States and even in Europe over the next three and a half years. But in February he learned that the tumor had returned, and the director declared the San Francisco Symphony Gala last Saturday, announced as an 80 ° tribute to this native angels, would be his last public appearance.
She was taken to the podium by her husband, Joshua Robison, who remained sitting on stage, keeping an attentive eye. Tilson Thomas began with the variations and escape of Benjamin Britten on a Purcell theme, better known as “The guide of the young man for the orchestra.” After several tributes and performances in his honor, MTT, Ever The Great Showman, came out with an explosion, leading a triumphant, mystical and incredibly glorious performance of the “Roman festivals” triumphant of Respight.
A song by “On The Town” by Leonard Bernstein, including the line “Where has it gone all the time?” – followed like a bis, sung by guest singers and the San Francisco symphonic choir, just before the balloons fell happily from above.
For six decades, starting with its university years at the USC, where it attracted the attention of Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Jascha Heife, Gregor Piatigorsky and the strange rock musician 'N' Roll about the city-Tileson Thomas has been a key figure of joy in US music.
Pon Mtt Down is an unreasonable task. He saw a bigger image than any great American director before him, including his mentor and champion, Bernstein. With a pioneering sensation of eclecticism, he connected the points between John Cage and James Brown, between Mahler and the famous grandfather of MTT, Boris Thomashefsky, a star of the New York Yiddish Theater.
Tilson Thomas has nurtured generations of young musicians and has given voice to strangers that are very responsible for American music to become what it is. He treated Mavericks as icons: Meredith Monk and Lou Harrison among them.
The San Francisco concert could touch little about this, but it did reveal something that makes Mtt Tick. In the “Young Person Guide”, for example, Tilson Thomas demonstrated an eternal love for all aspects of the orchestra, as well as his devotion of a lifetime to education. As 25 -year -old Boston Symphony director, I was talking to the public, sharing the enthusiasm for which not all tense Bostonians were quite ready.
Not long after, Bernstein happened at the concerts of the New York Philharmonic. He made television and radio documentaries. In 1987, he founded the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, training orchestra. Students are now busy reinventing American orchestral life. In Los Angeles, former New World Violinist Shalini Vijayan cures the imaginative music series of the new Koreatown music on Tuesdays @ Monk Space.
With the young director Teddy Abrams by his side, Tilson Thomas, treated more to the “guide of the young man” as an experienced guide of players for the orchestra. A distinctive seal of the Tilson Thomas mandate in San Francisco had been to encourage a typically suffocated degree of free expression in the set game. Britten's score is a solo fuss, and this time everyone seemed to be saying, in many notes: “This is for you Michael.”
Michael Tilson Thomas Redy Britten's 'Variations and Fugue on a Purcell' theme to open his gala concert with the Symphony of San Francisco in Davies Symphony Hall.
(Stefan Cohen / San Francisco Symphony)
This is for you, Michael, as was all that followed. While Tilson Thomas sat in a chair in front of the stage looking at the orchestra, Abrams, musical director of the Louisville Orchestra and a native of Berkeley who began studying at 9 years with Tilson Thomas, directed the enthusiastic obertor to Joseph Rumshinsky's comedy at the Yiddish Theater, “Khantshe in Amerike.” Bessie Thomashefsky, the grandmother of Tilson Thomas, was the original Khantshe in 1915.
Throughout his career, Tilson Thomas has been an active composer, but only in recent years he finally began to freely release his thoughtful and melancholic songs that served as informal dishes in a private magazine. Mezzo Soprano Sasha Cooke led with “Immer Wieder” to a poem by Rilke. Frederica von Stade, who is still vibrant at 79, joined her for “not everyone thinks I am beautiful.”
The two songs that Tenor Ben Jones turned to, “Drift off to sim” and “Responsid Oreings”, transferred Odas to melancholy. Broadway singer Jessica Vosk, whose career in the show business was launched when Tilson Thomas took her out of the San Francisco symphonic choir to be a soloist in “West Side Story”, raised spirits with “senior again” “.
Cooke sang “Grace”, that Tilson Thomas wrote for Bernstein's 70th birthday, but here he acquired a new brave meaning in his final stanza: “Make us thank what comes later / in this life on the earth that we share / because the truth is / life is good.”
Edwin Outwater, who began as assistant director of Tilson Thomas in San Francisco, directed the inspiring final of Bernstein's “Chichester Psalms” before Tilson Thomas returned to lift the roof with “Roman festivals.”
The evocations of Respighti gladiators in the Maximus Circus, of the first Christian pilgrims and other scenes of ancient Roman life, seem a surprisingly strange epilogue for the historical career of an American orchestra director. But Tilson Thomas has always been a dazzling programmer, even in his 20 years when he served as musical director of the Ojai Festival. “Roman festivals” has long been a favorite of Tilson Thomas. He recorded it with the Phil in 1978, savoring the details of ancient Rome in all its intricate and realistic complexity.
This last time, Tilson Thomas offered an epic look, but longing. The trumpets sounded with a surprisingly strong majesty. The pilgrims lost in an impressive meditative refinement. In the last of the four festivals, “The Epifany”, Grace and Grandeur merged as one, with the final score of the massively powerful final orchestral. It was as if Tilson Thomas was telling the audience: “This is for you. And I'm still saying it.”
Tilson Thomas has practiced to reflect on what happens when music stops. What remains? How long does music remain with us, somewhere inside? Can you change us? Does it matter?
From the moment, Tilson Thomas became a musical director of the Symphony of San Francisco in 1995, treated the orchestra as an essential component of San Francisco's life. His successor, Es-Pekka Salonen, has taken it seriously the type of innovative spirit he had brought to the Phil. However, the orchestra management has not provided the necessary support, and Salonen leaves in June. The musicians stopped outside Davies delivering flyers to the audience demanding that the orchestra pursue the mission of Tilson Thomas.
San Francisco's symphony has reached a turning point. Respight wrote about “The Epiphany” that wanted frantic clamor and intoxicating noise, expressing the popular feeling “We are Romans, let's go!” Tilson Thomas beat these three orchestral chords of emphatic staccato: Leave! Us! Approve! -As if it were destined to sound, cancel and cancel, as durable as Centenary Roman monuments.
