Michael Tilson Thomas

This is from Amazon.com's Get Started in Classical.

Michael Tilson Thomas is firing up a new generation to get hooked on classical music

Look around at who's leading the world's major orchestras, and you still won't find many Americans on the podium. But one who has made it big is Michael Tilson Thomas, considered by many the finest American conductor of his generation. The success of MTT--as he is universally known in the business--in appealing to younger audiences and bringing a new vitality to San Francisco's music scene is just one of the ways in which the youthful-looking fiftysomething conductor resembles his former mentor Leonard Bernstein. Extremely polished, articulate, and theatrical (his grandparents were luminaries of the Yiddish theater movement), MTT is also an extraordinarily gifted pianist and is belatedly coming to terms with his aspirations as a composer, with his new Whitman Songs to be premiered this season by the San Francisco Symphony. Like Bernstein, MTT is known for the personally intense conviction of his interpretations--whether that of the American mavericks he champions (such as Steve Reich or Morton Feldman) or classics from the repertory--as if he is channeling the composer in question. His accounts of Stravinsky classics in fact draw on a personal relationship with the composer, whose music he celebrated in the summer of 1999 in an acclaimed Stravinsky Festival with the Symphony. In an interview with Amazon.com editor Thomas May, MTT shares his views on the role of the conductor, on Stravinsky, and on the paradoxes of the least-familiar of Mahler's symphonies, the Symphony No. 7--a recording of which he has just released.

Amazon.com: One thing that 's immediately obvious at your concerts is the wide cross-section of audience you attract, particularly a larger group of young people than is usually seen in the classical concert hall. How have you succeeded in enlarging your audience?

Michael Tilson Thomas: It's a process that's occurred over the years. Even earlier as a guest conductor I'd schedule a mixture of very solid big traditional pieces with contemporary American music, slanted toward a younger audience which would be more adventurous in its tastes. But I think the public has picked up on the fact that in addition to the programming there is a much more adventurous concept of music-making that the orchestra and I are building together. It's presented in a much freer, more colorful, more gestural, more rhythmically focused way. My relationship with the members of the orchestra has become based on the idea that it's more fun to do these pieces in a way that is less ritualistic and more performance oriented.

Amazon.com: Have you consciously tried to redefine or demystify the role of the conductor?

MTT: I haven't consciously tried to do it--it's just my approach. I think of being a conductor very much more like being a director with a great ensemble, where I work with the players--who in this case are musicians but could just as easily be actors--and try to create a situation in the rehearsals where they have a greater sense of freedom to be involved as themselves in the performances. Very often I'm tailoring things to their specific strengths and encouraging them to be more daring and more personal in the way that they approach this music. In general, a lot of conductors try to control people--you know, to get them to kind of make their music and color within the lines. I'm just the opposite. I'm trying to get them to basically get past the notation so that they play the music as if they are improvising it.

Amazon.com: You personally knew Stravinsky when you were a young man growing up in Los Angeles. What impact has that had on the way you approach his music?

MTT: I became captivated with his music as a child. I got to see him conduct on many occasions and had a chance in my late teenage years and early 20s to actually work under his direction. The most valuable thing to me was how he sang his own music: [to] the orchestra, when he was giving his advice about how something should be played. He was hugely interested in shape and in all the issues of inflection, just as though you were a dancer being asked to make a particularly complex and energetic gesture. He was quite obsessive about the beginnings and ends of phrases and the kind of swing that went through the phrase. That's the fundamental take that I have on the music and the way that I approach all of it.

Amazon.com: During your performance of The Rite of Spring at the Stravinsky Festival, it seemed exuberant, not dark at all, with an acute sense of its folk basis.

MTT: I think of it as a very Russian piece. And also a very happy piece: it celebrates fertility and regeneration. True, there is a human sacrifice at the end, but I prefer to think of that sacrifice as if they have a big party to celebrate spring, and one girl has such a good time that the next morning they found out she's dead. It's this enormously ecstatic dance-party aspect of the piece which has always gripped me so powerfully. Basically the whole piece is melodic; it's just rhythms--and melodies stretched over them--for nearly the entire piece. Even the use of dissonance is to express the ecstatic and to bring you into this world of village music. It's not to express some kind of angst or anger. It's like being in a village where people are playing music on instruments which they've invented themselves: they aren't really tuned in accordance with one another; they have odd squeaks and strange individualistic characters because they are folk instruments. [That's why Stravinsky] puts instruments in the extremes of their registers: it suggests this sort of rude music-making of villagers.

Amazon.com: Even though you obviously didn't know him, you seem to have a similar intensely personal kind of relationship to Mahler.

MTT: I've always had this sleepwalking aspect when it comes to Mahler: I just feel so close to that music. Sometimes it scares me that I understand it so well. The Ninth was actually the first Mahler symphony I ever conducted--with the Boston Symphony when I was 24. I first started getting into his music when I was 10 or 12 years old. So much of what that music expressed [corresponded to] these sensitive, intelligent, lonely Jewish teenager feelings. I can still access and feel very close to that.

Amazon.com: Your recording of Das Klagende Lied made an impressive case for this relatively neglected youthful work.

MTT: It's a piece I absolutely adore. People have problems sometimes with what they perceive as the discontinuity of that piece, but I think it's one of the most astonishing representations of storytelling in music. The pauses and the discontinuities are all as if you were telling a bedtime story to a child, and said, "Then, the two brothers disappeared into the forest and were never seen again!" It's like the way you play around telling a story to a kid, with the disappearances, the suspense. In the case of the Seventh Symphony, it's also a piece which often does not get as strong a performance as it needs because--especially about the last movement--people say, "It's so incoherent, it's jumping around." I think that's the whole point. It's the most brilliant study in psychological discontinuity. The scherzo is one of the maddest things he ever produced. And that last movement is a series of jump cuts between moods, tempi, orchestrations, everything. It's kind of like having psychotic breaks while conducting a performance of Meistersinger.

Amazon.com: Where are we as a culture in our view of Mahler now? There does seem to be a sort of sea change going on toward a more--for lack of a better word--"objective" view.

MTT: Not this puppy; I'm just the opposite. I'm heading toward performances which are much more colorful, personal, in which every member of the orchestra is treated as a lieder singer who is given lots of opportunities to shape and really interpret this music. I see [Mahler symphonies] as enormous operas or song cycles. There are solo moments where it all hinges on one player. Every member of the orchestra must play at that sort of level. It's all about the inflection and confessional aspect of the music, and of course revealing its sources. That's the whole thing in Mahler's music, whether it's folk, cabaret, military, dance, or religious music sources. It's very important that at that moment the players be encouraged to play in those sorts of styles, rather than just smooth all of that over. This is the opposite of what Brahms did, who also used folk, religious, or cabaret music in his symphonies, to name just three sources. But Brahms always covered his tracks in the orchestration and the way he presented things. Mahler is throwing these things in highly contrasted profile. The art of the conductor and the performers is to present this in as vivid a way as possible, and yet at the same time have it be structurally coherent.

Thomas May, Classical Editor

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