What MTT Taught Me

There is nothing that is too difficult

Michael Tilson Thomas passed away April 22, not a surprise in that everyone in classical music knew that he had been suffering from a brain tumor, but still a jolt. This is not an obituary—there’s a good one from Tony Tommasini—or any kind of review of his history or even an analysis of what he did and why he was notable. Anyone who had the chance to hear him talk about and demonstrate how music works has had that experience, from a TED Talk to his superb Keeping Score video series.

This is my own addendum to Joshua Kosman’s wise, personal looks at MTT’s significance in San Francisco and to himself. One thing Kosman does is show how scattered concert experiences here and there don’t give you a real picture of what an ensemble and their conductor are doing, what they value, and where they’re going. This can only be seen over a longer run, hearing sound and style and manner come together, the ensemble and audience accumulating playing and listening practices.

I lived in San Francisco 1992-2007 and went to San Francisco Symphony concerts a dozen or more times a year, and was fortunate to see and hear a lot of what MTT did there, and from the moment I saw the 2022 public announcement on his prognosis, I’ve been thinking about what he showed me and, yes, taught me, sitting up there in the balcony.

To Be and To Know

When do we know things? What is the process of discovering something new to us and then coming to understand what it means? How did I come to know anything about MTT, and then so much that he enriched my life? When I was a teenager, I heard the Mahavishnu Orchestra album Apocalypse, the band playing with (not in front of, but with) the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by MTT who also wrote the orchestrations.

It’s a hell of an album that, because classical music culture is what it is, branded the conductor as unserious for many years.

By the time he was named music director in San Francisco, I had heard more of his music making—especially his Gershwin and Ives albums—though not a ton. Still, it was exciting to have an American conductor there with the promise of more 20th century and American music. Me and my friend Zoe Keating and my pals from graduate school were jazzed about that, and we saw his first performance after that announcement, sitting in the seats behind the orchestra for Scheherazade and the Rite of Spring. That was a fucking blast for everyone in the audience, orchestra, and MTT himself, who was clearly having the time of this life. I will never forget that.

There are other things embedded in my mind. His first American Mavericks Festival (which roped in the Grateful Dead playing Cage, Meredith Monk leading some symphony musicians in her vocal technique, Steve Reich with MTT and Musicians playing Four Organs and Music for 18 Musicians) opened with Carl Ruggle’s Sun-Treader. The balcony was packed with faces unfamiliar from my usual concert-going experience in Davies Hall, there, like me, to hear a piece of music they never imagined anyone would ever play in concert. The excitement and good will of that was incredible.

The only time I’ve ever seen a performance of Stravinsky’s Persephone was MTT and SFS. The only time I’ve seen a big name ensemble and conductor take a shot at John Cage’s Song Books was the same. At a concert with a Rossini overture, a Haydn Cello Concerto, and John Adams’ Harmonielehre, I heard the people behind me complaining about the modern piece scheduled last, assuming many would leave at intermission. They stuck around and after the final applause died down, were saying that was the greatest concert they had ever seen.

Then there was the stupendous Mahler cycle. Not only were these performances some of the best I’ve heard, but MTT stuck with the premiere of the cycle, the tragic and devastating Symphony No. 6, the first concert coming just a few days after 9/11. It made such human sense that it’s still difficult for me to listen to that recording. The Andante moderato was closer to Adagio because that’s what it had to be that night.

MTT also taught me an indispensable lesson, something that I have repeated constantly through the years: there is no such thing as difficult music. He proved it one summer evening. The symphony had a short, innocuous “Sacred and Profane” summer festival. Opening night featured Mozart’s Requiem and drew in a crowd, including families with kids, that I never saw in the hall during the regular season.

I came specifically for the opening work, Aion by Giacinto Scelsi. If you don’t know this work, it’s … well …

… twenty minutes of orchestral microtonality trying to open up your third eye, or tear a whole in the fabric of the universe. But before they played it, MTT came out and explained about Scelsi’s unusual methods and goals, how microtonality worked, and what the purpose of the music was. Then they played, it was astonishing and crushing, and this audience of well-mannered squares from Walnut Creek (I mean this in the best sense) went absolutely apeshit. This was the most passionate ovation I have ever, ever been around.

If you can play this music for an audience that probably barely knows Mozart outside of Amadeus, and get that reaction, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS DIFFICULT MUSIC, and there is no excuse, ever, for not putting out-of-the-ordinary experiences in front of audience, with confidence. It’s a shame that on the administrative side, it takes someone like MTT to give the suits the courage to support music. What’s happened since in San Francisco, with Esa-Pekka Salonen leaving because he’s sick of the quailing sensibilities of the reactionary old money San Francisco types on the board, is more evidence.

I last saw MTT conduct the New York Philharmonic in 2023 and 2024. That first one had him lead a deeply effecting Schubert Symphony in C Major, “Great.” This was so smooth and skillful—the phrases flowing one after another, the tempos and placement and pace of the pulse so perfect that they were almost unnoticeable—that it took awhile to realize that you were levitating over complex and infinite depths of thoughts and emotions. Schubert’s late music is substantially about his awareness of his own pending death, and here was a conductor who knew he was dying, and I still cannot quite fully understand that profound experience of hearing this conversation about death, across two hundred years, in front of a living audience.

The following year, his Mahler No. 5 with the Philharmonic was commanding in detail, and surprisingly light. Not in a bad way, in an unexpected way, as if, with limited time left, the turmoil of a journey from darkness and death to light and life was behind him. Instead, there was delight in just how incredible this music is, in how Mahler could possibly have done this. The performance was full of admiration.

The best compliment I can think of when it comes to a musical experience is that no matter how you might feel about it in the moment, it lingers on for years, even a lifetime. And that has always been my experience of MTT. He’s with me for a lifetime.

If you’re looking for MTT to listen to: Mahler, of course, and Stravinsky, Debussy, Gershwin, Ives. His Boston recordings include a fabulous Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 1 and a stellar William Schuman Violin Concerto, and in San Francisco, play everything he did for John Adams and Lou Harrison.

Album of the Week

I had the great good fortune to get an invitation from David Lang to a sort of release party for note to a friend, which came out in February. The Attacca Quartet and Theo Bleckmann performed an excerpt from this piece, and it was remarkable.

This is a monologue that sets Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s suicide note, and as Lang explained is addressed from the standpoint of the dead man, back to speak to the living. This is obviously emotional, dense, and unsettling, but Lang makes it engrossing, expressively and morally complex, and compelling. Since around the time of his The Little Match Girl Passion, which I saw premiered in 2007, he’s been working in the vein of making etched, graceful music that holds some of the most wrenching dramatic content, hitting the difficult and skillful balance of maintaining a level of control that gives full expression without demolishing the listener. There’s nothing like it.