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Return of the maverick
Michael Tilson Thomas is back in Boston
BY DAVID WEININGER

The days when the only American orchestras one had to know anything about were the ‘big five’ — Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Chicago — are long gone. A combination of rising playing standards and shrinking recording contracts has made it increasingly difficult to identify the "leading" orchestras in this country. Now, groups in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Cincinnati, and St. Louis are as capable of cranking out great performances as their more famous rivals, and they often do so more adventurously. As the Washington Post’s Pulitzer-winning Tim Page wrote a few years ago, the "hoary roster" of the Five is "not only long-outdated but downright misleading."

The best evidence for this change is in California. For the past several months the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Esa-Pekka Salonen have been basking in the glow of Frank Gehry’s new Disney Hall, the most visible sign of their success. Meanwhile, their colleagues up north — Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony — have been enjoying wide acclaim and a remarkably harmonious relationship that’s about to enter its tenth year as it brings them to Symphony Hall next Monday.

When the California native took over in San Francisco, he insisted that almost every concert include a work by an American composer. The "American Mavericks" festival of 2000 earned plaudits for reaching beyond the traditional Ives-Copland-Bernstein axis to explore works by Carl Ruggles, George Antheil, Morton Feldman, and Henry Cowell, among others. Its success was a tribute not only to Tilson Thomas’s own nonconformist spirit but to his charisma and ability to bring the audience along, even on bumpy rides.

Conductor and orchestra have recently jumped on the DIY bandwagon and are now recording all of Mahler’s symphonies on the orchestra’s San Francisco Symphony Media label. Hot on the heels of a Best Classical Album Grammy for last year’s recording of the Third Symphony, the label released the Fourth Symphony last week, and this one shows the cycle’s strengths and weaknesses in microcosm. It confirms the San Francisco as a great orchestra: the brass and wind playing in particular are terrific, and if the strings sound a bit thin, their playing still brims with elegance and grace. And Tilson Thomas does a great job of balancing winds and strings and allowing Mahler’s panoply of voices to come through. But he slows down to near immobility at cadences and other "big moments." It makes for an odd interpretive combination, and even in the heavenly slow movement — and slow it is, here — one gets the sense that the conductor isn’t quite sure what he wants to say.

More interesting is Keeping Score: Michael Tilson Thomas on Music, a new multimedia project with the familiar yet elusive goal of increasing the public’s understanding of classical music. Its first events are two telecasts to be broadcast later in the spring on PBS: one offers an introductory tour of just what it is that conductors and orchestras do by showing them rehearsing for a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony; the second features a complete live performance of the work. The rehearsal segment is smart and engaging, even for an experienced listener. Rehearsing the first movement’s waltz theme at the piano with his concertmaster, Tilson Thomas shows how changing the violinists’ bowing can radically alter the melody’s character. In some bits the conductor speaks so earnestly as to come close to pandering, but the show is still a compelling mix of entertainment and education from the man who did the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts during the 1970s.

Of course, Boston was an early stop on Tilson Thomas’s journey as well: he was assistant conductor and principal guest conductor at the BSO some 30 years ago. So Symphony Hall will be familiar territory when he arrives here March 22 on the SF Symphony’s East Coast tour. They’ll play the Boston premiere of John Adams’s My Father Knew Charles Ives and — what else? — more Mahler, this time the Fifth Symphony. It’s an 8 p.m. FleetBoston Celebrity Series show, and tickets are $37 to $72; call (617) 482-6661.

MORE HAPPY RETURNS. Among the Cantata Singers’ recurrent Bach offerings, none is more eagerly awaited than their performances of the epically great St. Matthew Passion. It returns next week under David Hoose, with David Kravitz singing Jesus’s role and William Hite as the Evangelist. Performances are at Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street in Boston, on March 19 at 7:30 p.m. and March 21 at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $48; call (617) 267-6502.


Issue Date: March 12 - 18, 2004
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