Music Review : Tilson Thomas’ Return Energizes Debut Orchestra

Not counting the Ojai Festival of 1994, it’s been more than six years since Michael Tilson Thomas last conducted here, the city of his birth and scene of his early conducting triumphs. The occasion for his return, Thursday night at Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena, was a gala 40th-anniversary concert by the Debut Orchestra of the Young Musicians Foundation, an ensemble Tilson Thomas led during the late 1960s.

The slender, elegant, ever-communicative conductor, hardly changed physically since we first heard him (as pianist) at the Ojai Festival of 1965, when he was 20, retains his youthfulness and exuberance at 50. As podium guest on this occasion, the music director-designate of the San Francisco Symphony led only two works but brightly dominated the proceedings.

He still stirs the soup: His tempos in both Brahms’ “Academic Festival” Overture and Bernstein’s Overture to “Candide,” at each end of this program, seemed breathless, if perfectly articulate.

More important, Tilson Thomas seemed to cause in his young colleagues an alertness and energy that resulted in performances both probing and clarified. In these two showpieces, as in the rest of the program, momentary raggednesses and instrumental missteps could distract, though not for long. If not immaculate, the playing exhibited many skills, strong ensemble and high spirits, mostly without raucousness.

In a short speech before the “Candide” excerpt, Tilson Thomas paid tribute to the many friends, supporters and volunteers who have made Young Musicians Foundation successful over these decades. Of course he did not leave out the organization’s irrepressible founder, Sylvia Kunin, who was in the hall to acknowledge the tribute.

The rest of the evening also achieved an admirable plateau. Current Debut Orchestra music director Lara Webber led a clarified, lusty, poignant performance of Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” after intermission.

Before that, two YMF alumni of international stature, violinist Ida Levin and cellist Jeffrey Solow, were the ideally matched, handsome-toned and eloquent protagonists in Brahms’ Double Concerto, with Webber & Orchestra accomplishing a suitably mellow but impassioned account of the tricky score.