San Francisco – The mayor of San Francisco, Daniel Lurie, said Michael Tilson Thomas Day. The town hall shone the blue of the MTT brand. Davies Symphony Hall, where Tilson Thomas presided over San Francisco Symphony for a quarter of influence, was spinning with giant blue balls.
For Tilson Thomas, everything was the culmination of what he declared in February: “We can all say the expression of the old show:” It is an envelopment. “”
Despite the start of treatment for an aggressive form of brain cancer in the summer of 2021, Tilson Thomas Surprisingly, continued to lead to the United States and even in Europe for the next three and a half years. But in February, he learned that the tumor had returned, and the conductor declared the Gala San Francisco Symphony last Saturday evening, presented as an 80th tribute to this native Angeleno, would be his last public appearance.
He was led on the podium by her husband, Joshua Robison, who was sitting on stage, keeping a vigilant eye. Tilson Thomas started with the variations and the fugue of Benjamin Britten on a theme of Purcell, better known as “The Young's Guide to the Orchestra”. After various tributes and performances in his honor, MTT, Ever The Great Showman, was released with a blow, conducting a triumphant and mystical and incredibly glorious performance of the Splashy “Roman festivals” of the Repighi.
A song by “On the Town” by Leonard Bernstein – including the line “Where has the time went?” – Followed as a reminder, sung by invited singers and the San Francisco Symphony choir, just before the balloons fell happily from above.
For six decades, starting with his undergraduate years at the USC – where he drew the attention of Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Jascha Heifetz, Gregor Piatigorsky and the strange rock musician 'N' Roll on the city – Tilson Thomas was a key figure in joy in American music.
Pinking Mtt Down is an unreasonable task. He saw an image larger than any great American conductor in front of him – his mentor and champion, Bernstein, included. With a pioneering feeling of eclecticism, he connected the points between John Cage and James Brown, between Mahler and the famous grandfather of MTT, Boris ThomashefskyA New York Yiddish Theater star.
Tilson Thomas has nourished generations of young musicians and gave the voice to foreigners very responsible for American music becoming what it is. He treated mavericks as icons – Monk meredith And Lou Harrison Among them.
The San Francisco concert could touch little, but it revealed something that makes MTT vibrate. In “Young's Guide”, for example, Tilson Thomas has demonstrated an eternal love of all aspects of the orchestra as well as his permanent devotion to education. As a deputy head of Boston Symphony, 25, he spoke to an audience, sharing the enthusiasm that all Bostonians of all goods were not very ready.
Shortly after, he succeeded Bernstein in the concerts of New York Philharmonic Young People. He made television and radio documentaries. In 1987, he founded the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, musicians from the training orchestra. The ancients are now busy reinventing American orchestral life. In Los Angeles, the former violinist of the New World Shalini Vijayan is organizing the imaginative series of New Music Koreatown New Music Tuesdays @ space monk.
With the young conductor Teddy Abrams by his side that turns the pages, Tilson Thomas treated the “young guide” more as a experienced guide to the orchestra. A characteristic of Tilson Thomas' mandate in San Francisco had been to encourage a general expression generally suffocated in the overall game. Britten's score is a riot of solos, and this time, they all seemed to say, in so many notes: “It's for you Michael.”
Michael Tilson Thomas leads Britten's “variations and fugue by Britten on a theme of Purce” to open his gala concert with the San Francisco Symphony at the Davies Symphony Hall.
(Stefan Cohen / San Francisco Symphony)
It's for you, Michael, just like everything that has followed. While Tilson Thomas was sitting on a chair at the front of the stage looking at the orchestra, Abrams – Musical director of the Louisville Orchestra and from Berkeley who began to study at 9 years old with Tilson Thomas – led the theater comedy of Joseph Rumshinsky, “Khantshe in Amerike”. Bessie Thomashefsky, Tilson Thomas' grandmother, was the original Khants in 1915.
Throughout his career, Tilson Thomas has been an active composer, but it was only in recent years that he had finally started to take out his pensive and melancholic songs more actively that have served as informal entries in a private newspaper. Mezzo Soprano Sasha Cooke led “Immer Wieder” to a poem by Rilke. Frederica von stadium, still vibrant at 79, joined him for “everyone doesn't think I'm beautiful”.
The two songs that tenor ben Jones turned to “Drift Off to Sleep” and “replied prayers”, made Odes pass in Melancholy. Broadway singer Jessica Vosk – whose career in show business has been launched when Tilson Thomas chose her from San Francisco’s symphonic chorus to be solid in “West Side Story” – withdrew the spirits with “Take back Your mink” by “Sentials”, but we then recalled why we were all with Tilson Thomas “Sentials”.
Cooke sang “Grace”, which Tilson Thomas wrote for the 70th anniversary of Bernstein, but who took a new courageous sense here in his latest stanza: “Make us recognizing who comes then / in this life on earth that we share / because the truth is / life is good.”
Edwin Outwater, who made his debut as assistant conductor in Tilson Thomas in San Francisco, directed the inspiring final of the “Psalms of Chichester” of Bernstein before Tilson Thomas went up the roof with the “Roman festivals”.
The evocations of the gladiators of breathing at Circus Maximus, of the first Christian pilgrims and other scenes from ancient Roman life, seem an epilogue surprisingly strange to the legendary career of an American conductor. But Tilson Thomas has always been a striking programmer, even in their twenties when he was musical director of the Ojai festival. “Roman Festivals” has long been a favorite by Tilson Thomas. He recorded it with the Phil in 1978, savoring the details of ancient Rome in all its complex and realistic complexity.
This last time, Tilson Thomas offered an epic look, but desire, back. The trumpets climbed with surprisingly noisy majesty. The pilgrims were lost in an amazing meditative refinement. In the last of the four festivals, “The Epiphany”, Grace and grandeur merged, with a final orchestral punctuation and massively powerful final. It was as if Tilson Thomas said to the public: “This one is for you. And I'm still there the saying.”
Tilson Thomas made a practice of thinking about what is happening when the music stops. What is left? How long does music stay with us somewhere inside? Can it change us? Is it important?
From the moment when Tilson Thomas became music director of San Francisco Symphony in 1995, he treated the orchestra as an essential element of the life of San Francisco. His successor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, took this to heart with the kind of innovative spirit he had brought to the Phil. The management of the orchestra did not however provide the necessary support and Salonen Part in June. The musicians stood outside Davies by distributing leaflets to the public demanding that the orchestra pursues the mission of Tilson Thomas.
San Francisco Symphony reached a turning point. Respighi wrote about “Epiphany” he wanted frantic clamors and intoxicating noise, expressing the popular feeling “We are Romans, let's go!” Tilson Thomas beat these three orchestral emphatic staccato orchestral agreements – Leave! We! Pass! – as intended to ring, ring and ring, as sustainable as dry Roman monuments.
