The Real Maverick

I first heard the name Michael Tilson Thomas when I was a grad student at Harvard in the early seventies. “MTT,” as he was soon to be known throughout the music world, was across the Charles River doing vibrant and provocative performances as assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In his mid-twenties, youthful, charismatic, articulate, he provided a vivid contrast to the old-world sobriety of that orchestra’s previous music directors. Needless to say, his programs were the only ones that might attract us fire-breathing wannabe avant-garde composers who, with the supreme intolerance only youth can summon, would casually dismiss Mahler and Brahms in favor of Stockhausen and Xenakis. Little did I imagine that Michael’s and my life would become entwined in strikingly creative ways over the following five decades.

He had won the coveted Koussevitzky Prize at Tanglewood and from there went to Boston. It was not the best of times for the BSO. Its aging music director, William Steinberg, often was out sick, and Michael’s presence provided a much-needed jolt of electricity. Not surprisingly, he wasted no time in rousing—and razzing—the staid Symphony Hall subscribers. One of his party pieces was Carl Ruggles’s Sun-Treader, a mighty, in-your-face-dissonant piece of Americana that even today retains its power to shock and awe. I was amused by the thought that a young conductor born in Los Angeles into a family of famous Russian-Jewish theater personalities would make his first impact with the music of a couple of gnarly WASP New Englanders like Ruggles and Charles Ives, whose Three Places in New England he soon recorded along with Sun-Treader for DGG.

I missed Michael’s most talked-about BSO scandale, his performance in Boston and later in New York of Steve Reich’s Four Organs. That piece, probably the most procedurally stubborn of Steve’s early works, was in those days a tough listen for the uninitiated, and when Michael brought it to New York, it drove some listeners up the wall, not just for its slowly evolving form, but also for its use of amplification. Hard to believe that at the same time Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton were soaring at maximum decibels, classical music audiences remained almost universally hostile to the incorporation of technology in performance. It is a testament to Michael’s foresightedness that even as early as 1971 he would identify the then barely known Steve Reich as one of America’s great composers.

Michael has never lost his curiosity and almost childlike enthusiasm for new music.

To this day Michael has never lost his curiosity and almost childlike enthusiasm for new music, and the list of composers that he has championed, to name just a few, includes Meredith Monk, Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, David Del Tredici, Charles Wuorinen, Steven Mackey, Morton Feldman, Mason Bates, and Samuel Carl Adams—a remarkably “big tent” variety of voices. How many music directors world-famous for their performances of Mahler and Beethoven would be found presenting a video analysis of a John Cage piece online, and then invite the Grateful Dead to join with the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra for Cage’s Renga with Apartment House 1776 in a festival devoted to American music? And with what other conductor would the Grateful Dead agree to do it?

We first met when he conducted Shaker Loops with the American Composers Orchestra in 1983. I’d originally written it for seven solo strings but made this version for full string orchestra just for that concert. A lot of new pieces have difficult childhoods. It takes time not only for performers but also for the composers to understand what the essential nature of a piece is. The performance was tentative. Michael was clearly groping to find that “essence,” and I honestly wasn’t entirely sure myself what I’d wanted. We met for breakfast the following morning and what ensued was a conversation that made me realize how in taking up a new work, whether a classic or something never before performed, Michael is always on a search for the piece’s DNA, that critical element that generates the work’s uniqueness. That may seem like a no-brainer, but how few conductors actually ask those questions of a piece and not simply try to imitate whatever favorite recording they have of it? In later years we’d have conversations about Mahler or Stravinsky or Brahms, and I’d listen as he’d marvel at some phrase or harmonic modulation, always looking for the special skeleton key that would unlock the secret of a piece, what I came to call “the great reveal.”

The Shaker Loops performance was the first of many of my pieces that he conducted. One day in 1985 when I was just beginning work on Nixon in China, he called and asked for “a short fanfare” for the opening of a new festival in Massachusetts. I groaned at the thought of having to break off important work to extrude yet another of those obligatory ditties that we composers are so often asked for. But it was Michael, and how could I decline? The result was Short Ride in a Fast Machine, and I never regretted that I’d complied to write that particular ditty.  Later he premiered My Father Knew Charles Ives, Absolute Jest, and I Still Dance, the piece I wrote to celebrate his and his husband Joshua Robison’s lifelong partnership. He took to heart my Harmonielehre, winning a Grammy in 2013 for Best Orchestral Performance with the San Francisco Symphony.

His history with the San Francisco Symphony spans an astonishing fifty years. I first saw him conduct them in the mid-seventies, and, as expected, there was Ives on the program. There is no comparison between the orchestra of those days and the world-class ensemble it is today. And, unlike many music directors who, once their weeks are concluded, are out the door on their way to the airport, Michael long ago made San Francisco his home and became a familiar and beloved figure whose face seemed to be everywhere, a source of immense local pride.

It’s not surprising that with his kind of curiosity, coupled with his capacity for identifying so strongly the emotional content of the music, he would become one of our great Mahler interpreters. Over the years I have been lucky enough to hear his performances with the San Francisco Symphony and witness the gradual evolution of both his and the orchestra’s way with those enormous, complex, and at times formally frustrating symphonies. By the end of his long tenure as music director the communication between him and the players was at a level of confidence and subtlety that can only be attained when musicians have known and trusted each other for a very long time. One thinks of Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra or von Karajan and Berlin. And he is humble in the presence of a great work. He recently confessed to me, almost in a whisper, “Now and then I will have an inspiration and decide to override Mahler’s indications. I always ended up regretting it.”

His career has been so full of wildly different experiences that it’s impossible to even begin acknowledging them all: his life as a composer of thoughtful, sometimes witty, sometimes quietly reflective pieces; his revelatory Keeping Score videos that explore his favorite repertoire; his long and fruitful partnerships with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the London Symphony Orchestra; the staggering number of recordings. The genes passed down from his Thomashefsky theatrical family tree most certainly contributed to his stage savvy. Glam? You want glam? He could do it, as when he celebrated his 70th birthday with a performance of Liszt’s Hexameron for six grand pianos and orchestra followed by an apparition of Beach Blanket Babylon (a San Francisco tradition) doing the mambo down the aisles of Davies Hall. His West Side Story was consummate pizzazz. Only in the opera pit has his presence been unfortunately absent. His has always been too restless and quicksilver a mind to endure the kind of long-haul grind that opera conducting requires.

Michael has mentored generation after generation of our finest American orchestra players.

Of the many qualities he shares with Leonard Bernstein, a one-time mentor, the most important is his devotion to young musicians. While Bernstein had an inestimable impact on American culture through his televised Young People’s Concerts, Michael, perhaps in a less sensational but every bit as important a way, has mentored generation after generation of our finest American orchestra players. One of his life’s greatest inspirations was the creation of the New World Symphony. And where would that be located? In Miami Beach of course! It would be typically Michael to envision an orchestra of brilliant twenty-somethings playing Stravinsky and Mozart and Berlioz in a Frank Gehry-designed concert hall while outside a thousand sunscreen-slathered tourists stroll the streets and head for the beach in flip flops and tank tops. But what else would you expect from the original American Maverick?