MUSIC REVIEW : With Much Ado, Tilson Thomas Takes the Town, and Vice Versa

Just another opening, another show? Forget it.

Michael Tilson Thomas, the former Angeleno Wunderkind who inaugurated his regime as 11th music director of the San Francisco Symphony on Wednesday, doesn’t work that way. Nor does San Francisco.

When these forces decide to make a fuss, it’s a big fuss.

The fuss began long before Tilson Thomas, a very youthful 50, made his brisk, ramrod-straight, arm-swaying entrance at Davies Hall, long before he received the first of numerous standing ovations, long before he conducted the glittery audience--not the orchestra--through a well-mugged national anthem, long before he offered a glorified and sometimes glorious pops concert as down payment on serious things to come.

Much like the comparable California enclave to the south, the city by the bay loves heroes, loves personality cults, loves to celebrate chic and adores cultural brouhaha. Tilson Thomas, who never got the respect he deserved in Los Angeles, looks like the right man in the right place at the right time.

He follows a distinguished if distinctly uneven line of podium predecessors that includes Henry Hadley, Alfred Hertz, Pierre Monteux, Enrique Jorda, Josef Krips, Seiji Ozawa and Edo de Waart. Most significantly, no doubt, he directly follows Herbert Blomstedt, who led the orchestra for a safe, sane and rather dull decade of Old World propriety.

With symphonic interest, and business, sagging under the burden of tasteful restraint, San Francisco is making the most of Tilson Thomas’ energetic--OK, dynamic--glamour image. Now is the hour for a new face and for little hard-sell. If Barry Bonds could do it for the Giants. . . .

In a brilliant application of media blitz, Tilson Thomas’ handsome features adorn billboards around town as well as television commercials. The end of opening week will have found him at work in a civic plaza for a free noontime concert, at the massive Concord Pavilion for a popular reprise of the inauguration gala minus stellar guests, and at a rehearsal open to the public.

The mayor will have bestowed on him the keys to the city. Record companies are paying conspicuous attention to the man who has just been given a sterling silver baton by the house of Cartier. The Tilson Thomas name is invoked nonstop on radio spots, and insiders--bona fide or would-be--refer to him simply by his initials. The publication of a collection of MTT interview-essays is marked, and marketed, with a properly ballyhooed book-signing ceremony. In general, the conductor’s all-American-genius image is hyped in a manner carefully designed to suggest the second coming of Leonard Bernstein.

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For his official coming-out party, the chef chose an eclectic menu of orchestral soup and nuts, and served it with characteristic flair. The dressy first-nighters paid as much as $310 for the music. The top tab rose another $1,000 for the official pre- and post-concert fashion-parade dindin-cum-dancing. Intermission booze and bubbly flowed generously.

Under the circumstances, the maestro was no doubt wise to concentrate on challenges that taxed neither the intellect nor the soul. There will be ample opportunity for Mahler and Beethoven later.

The festivities in the over-reverberant hall began with “A Parade for MTT,” six minutes of ruggedly jaunty Americana with a percussive Asian accent, courtesy of Lou Harrison (who resides in nearby Aptos). The venerated composer, resplendent in white beard and red work-shirt, led the applause from a box seat, stage right.

Tilson Thomas highlighted the sectional virtuosity of his band in a meticulously choreographed performance of Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,” a.k.a. Variations on a Theme of Purcell, minus narration. The signals from the podium may have looked a bit fussy, but the sweeping, delicately nuanced razzle-dazzle of the music-making was terrific.

Barbara Hendricks, first of two big-name soloists, sounded ill-at-ease in the Countess’ two arias from Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.” A fine Susanna, one felt, was trying in vain to impersonate her mistress. The soprano’s line was unsteady, her top tones were strained, her trill was absent, and fast tempos hardly reinforced the aura of contemplative repose. Tilson Thomas provided cool and crisp accompaniment.

The heat rose with Saint-Saens’ A-minor Cello Concerto, played with a perfect, natural fusion of finesse and passion by Yo-Yo Ma. The super-cellist returned after intermission (and after a long wait for the audience to settle down) as self-effacing first-fiddler in Villa-Lobos’ “Bachianas Brasileiras” No. 5, which, surprisingly, was receiving its first San Francisco Symphony performance. Hendricks sang and hummed with haunting sweetness, pitch problems in ascending passages notwithstanding.

Tilson Thomas made the capacity crowd (2,743) palpably happy with his parting gesture, an elegantly snazzy performance of Gershwin’s “American in Paris.” This man really knows how to go slumming in his white tie and tails (wardrobe designed in Rome, we were told, by Angelo Litrico).

At the end, after all the cheering subsided, Symphony officials bestowed the maestro with symbolic gifts including a municipal transportation pass, a parking ticket and a baseball cap. The orchestra serenaded MTT with--what else?--”San Francisco.”

For better or worse, an era has begun.