Michael Tilson Thomas is music director of the San Francisco Symphony, founder and artistic director of the New World Symphony and principal guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. Thomas’s is an artistic family: his grandparents, Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, were founding members of the Yiddish Theater in America; his father, Ted Thomas, was a producer in the Mercury Theater Company in New York and later worked in films and television in Los Angeles; his mother, Roberta Thomas, was the head of research for Columbia Pictures.
Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony completed their cycle of Mahler symphonies this fall (SFS Media). An avid proponent of new media, Thomas conducted the debut of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in the spring. Maestro Thomas spoke to Listen on the phone from Budapest, where he was shooting a video on Mahler, the latest entry of the Keeping Score DVD series.
You were already a Mahlerian before recording the cycle with the San Francisco Symphony. Can you share some of what has been revealed to you in the wake of recording the Mahler symphonies?
Well, as is always the case with performing great music, over more years you see more things as you keep going. I liken these symphonies to a national park. Anytime you revisit them, you see something else. You kind of know the pathways, you know what’s there, but you take it in from a different perspective, and people with whom you’re visiting the park also change the nature of your experience. Members of the orchestra and the audience go into this mysterious mix of why it becomes, over time, different.
So Mahler Eight will be released this fall [on the San Francisco Symphony label] and then that’s it!
Well yes, unless I start all over again. It’s like painting the Golden Gate Bridge, isn’t it? It’s never over. We’re also going on to do some more songs and, of course, this Keeping Score video, which treats the music in quite a different way.
Is the prime purpose of Keeping Score to shrink the distance between music and audience?
Yes, I think it’s to provide backstories on the origin of the music, the composers’ thoughts and experience and also the experiences of people who are involved in re-creating the music. And so these two kinds of backstories work with one another to hopefully make the listener feel much closer to the idea and the message of the piece.
What are your criteria for selecting which works will be investigated in that series?
Pretty much the same as anything else I do, which is that although I have the benefit — it seems a very long time ago — of a reasonably rigorous education, I find more and more I’m relying on pure instinct.
Four American composers feature heavily in your discography: Copland, Gershwin, Ives and Reich. Is this the great foursome of American twentieth century classical for you?
Well, they’re pretty great. You left out [Carl] Ruggles; I recorded his complete works. They’re out of print now, so I guess I have to go back and do it all over again.
Is that something you’d like to do?
Definitely.
Are there commonalities that these composers share?
Well, of course two of them I knew very well — know very well: Reich and Copland. Copland I met for the first time when I was about eighteen or nineteen, performed quite a lot of his music for him, premiered a piece or two. I have a very clear idea of him and his personality and his musical desires. The same with Steve Reich. I was responsible for the first performance by a major orchestra of a piece of his with the Boston Symphony all those years ago. Over many years I’ve been involved in a lot of projects with Steve.
In the case of Gershwin, of course, it’s my family that’s very much associated with him. Gershwin kind of grew up in and around my grandparents, my grandfather Boris Thomashevsky’s theater. My father, my uncles, my grandfather, all these people knew him very, very well, and my father played piano in a kind of Tin Pan Alley style which he had picked up from hanging around George as a kid, so I feel very close to that music as well.
Ives is somebody I discovered when I was around eighteen and I spent a lot of time around people who did know him, people like John Kirkpatrick and Lou Harrison and others. I find his music very engrossing and I stick with it because I think it has a very powerful message, and ultimately it doesn’t matter very much whether he wrote some of these things before or after anybody else, it’s that the music hangs in there and he has something very profound and moving to say, even a hundred or so years after it was written.
Are there other composers, American or otherwise, that you still wish to champion or record?
