Tilson Thomas: Back to His Roots in L.A.

Michael Tilson Thomas is coming back to Los Angeles.

Having begun his conducting career as music director of the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra while still a student at USC, Tilson Thomas had once been an almost ubiquitous presence in Los Angeles.

He was a favorite of the late Lawrence Morton, who regularly engaged him as conductor and pianist for the Monday Evening Concerts throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, as well as employing him at the Ojai Festival a half dozen times.

He was a regular guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, of which he eventually became a principal guest conductor. And then there was his presence with the Philharmonic Institute Orchestra, which he also headed.

But with the exception of returning to conduct a special Lawrence Morton memorial Monday Evening Concert last fall, Tilson Thomas has not performed in his hometown since severing his ties with the Philharmonic. That parting had not seemed a particularly happy occasion, Tilson Thomas having been passed over for the position of music director following Carlo Maria Giulini’s resignation.

But, while admitting that Tilson Thomas had, indeed, been one of many candidates considered for the post, Ernest Fleischmann, the Philharmonic’s executive director, claims that no bad feelings exist now between the Philharmonic and Tilson Thomas. Fleischmann also says that both he and Previn have repeatedly invited Tilson Thomas to return and they will continue to do so.

Tilson Thomas, however, has hardly been idle the past three years. He has made the rounds in San Francisco and Chicago and Pittsburgh and New York, as well as Europe. This will be his third summer as music director of the Great Woods Festival, the summer home in Massachusetts of the Pittsburgh Symphony. And then in September he begins his glamorous new job--music director of the London Symphony.

But it is the project perhaps closest to his heart that brings the 43-year-old conductor back to Southern California this week. Beginning Friday, Tilson Thomas will oversee a four-week residency at the Orange County Performing Arts Center with the New World Symphony, a national, advanced-training orchestra for young professional musicians, of which Tilson Thomas serves as artistic adviser.

The New World Symphony was founded last year by Miami arts patrons Ted and Lin Arlson. Built upon the model of European youth orchestras, the New World is an orchestra for players, ranging in age from 21 to 30, who have already graduated from conservatory or college and are practically ready to join a regular orchestra. It offers them full-time work and living accommodations during the orchestra’s winter season, and it offers Florida an exciting new orchestra.

The New World Symphony is important to Tilson Thomas for several other reasons, however. Although his career has never been livelier than it is now, the conductor says that he has always had a soft spot in his heart for young musicians, especially since he was about the age of the players of the YMF when he first began conducting it.

But as a conductor who had some major successes remarkably early and who has lived in the professional fast lane all his adult life, he also finds the orchestra a place where he can slow down and contemplate the important issues of music that too often get lost in the professional music world.

“There is just much more time to explore with the players continuing musical issues,” Tilson Thomas says. And time is obviously a precious commodity.

On a recent morning in New York City, Tilson Thomas, road-weary, had hoped to relax in his elegant Greenwich Village apartment. He had recently completed a tour with the Pittsburgh Orchestra by conducting Janacek’s demanding “Glagolitic” Mass in Carnegie Hall. The previous night he had made a special guest appearance to perform Gershwin for the New York City Ballet’s American Music Festival. The next day, he was leaving town.

But already the day was crowded with business. In his office, his desk and piano were almost as cluttered with papers and scores as his walls are with Gershwin mementos and a prominently placed photograph of Lawrence Morton. A programming meeting with Jeffrey Babcock, the New World Symphony’s executive director (and formerly the head of the YMF and L.A. Philharmonic Institute orchestras), was running late. There was Leonard Bernstein to see in the afternoon.

So, when Tilson Thomas settled down, a huge cup of coffee in hand, to talk about the New World Symphony, the talk at first was fast and slightly glib, the typical New York style of a wired, harassed executive.

But a few minutes into the conversation, something surprising happened to the conductor. After rattling off a few cliches about the orchestra, he quickly changed gears, turning thoughtful and eloquently expansive about his philosophy of performance.

“What I’m trying to do is to create a personal involvement between the players and the music that they’re performing, because very often in the conservatory these pieces just kind of go by,” Tilson Thomas explains.

“What I’m trying to build for them is the sense of a personal relationship between them and that particular composer and that particular work of that composer, so that not only do they perform that piece with great commitment, but they also develop an understanding of what’s beneath the surface of the music.”

What makes this all so attractive for Tilson Thomas is that it is just the opposite of the situation with the typical professional orchestra.

“Most professional musicians,” he contends, “really are not interested in why you are doing anything. They want you to tell them what it is you want, and then they want to go home.” But the joy for Tilson Thomas of working with the New World is that the players “want to look into everything, to investigate everything, to understand everything. They don’t want to go home early. They want to stay and figure it all out.”

Another useful function of the orchestra according to Tilson Thomas is that it is a social and a living situation, giving the musicians a couple of years away from the free-lance rat race, allowing them to get to know each other along with the music.

“If classical music is going to continue to exist and thrive, the ensemble must capture and continue to capture the public’s imagination and devotion, and the thing that captures the public’s imagination and devotion is the sense of excitement that they feel coming from the players.”

One example for Tilson Thomas of how this can happen in Miami was the experience of conducting a new work he had commissioned from Charles Wuorinen last season.

“When I introduced Charles to the orchestra,” he recalls, “there was a tremendous ovation. And having done a lot of pieces by Charles with other orchestras, I can tell you that that’s not the general way orchestras greet Charles. There’s maybe a kind of grudging respect for the fact that he’s obviously a tremendous thinker and musician. But this was like, ‘Wow! This guy wrote this really hard piece, and it’s really interesting and we play the hell out of it, and isn’t it nice to see him.’ ”

But perhaps Tilson Thomas’ most important role with the members of his orchestra is to help them unlearn the faceless style of conservatory playing, where the goal is too often to make every note beautiful instead of really exploring what the music is about.

“I actually believe that music is a representation of thought,” he contends, “of very specific thoughts--of very, very specific thoughts and feelings which somebody once felt and set down in the form of music. There are universal things at play here.

“That’s what I’m trying to build with these young musicians. And in the process I’m discovering a lot of these things more profoundly and more deeply working with them, because we have the time to be vulnerable to these sorts of things, instead of just having to make decisions that have to be made fast, because the clock is running out.”

The hardest part, though, Tilson Thomas says, is getting musicians to commit themselves, especially these days.

“There is just one thing after another,” he complains about the dictatorial way the early-music movement has had on traditional performers, what with the use of period instruments and the problems with editions of the classic masterworks.

That work goes on in various ways with the New World Symphony. Not only is each concert program--there will be four given at Segerstrom Hall--worked on extensively for about two weeks, but the players also perform chamber music and take tutorials. They are faced with major guest conductors as well: Daniel Lewis will and Eduardo Mata will share the duties in Orange County; and for the orchestra’s second Miami season, which runs from October to April, they will work with Hugh Wolff, James Conlon, Christoph Eschenbach, John Nelson, Maxim Shostakovich and others, along with Tilson Thomas.

But the event likely to attract the most attention next season will be the November 17th concert in Miami, when Tilson Thomas will give the world premiere performances of the new Critical Editions of Ives’ First and Fourth Symphonies as a prelude to his recording those editions with the Chicago Symphony.

That is yet one more benefit of the New World for Tilson Thomas: It allows him the opportunity to work up new pieces. So important, in fact, has the New World project become to him, he says that he has now reduced his guest conducting to practically nothing, devoting most of his time to his two orchestras, as well as getting back to more piano playing and doing some writing.

Finally there is the pleasure of returning to his hometown a success. Tilson Thomas may not have been asked back to conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic, but he says there is a special pride about displaying the New World Symphony, calling it the fulfillment of his work with the YMF and the L.A. Philharmonic Institute Orchestra. And next season, the conductor will be back again in Los Angeles, this time proudly heading his other, and much more famous, new orchestra, the London Symphony.