Return of the Prodigious Son

The key to understanding Michael Tilson Thomas must lie in his extraordinary ancestry. He’s the first to say as much, this celebrity maestro known to conduct Beethoven one moment and dance like James Brown the next, to pose in leather by the Golden Gate Bridge then scoop up Grammys by the handful, all while imploring his orchestra members--and audiences--to trust him, trust him and “come inside the music.”

But where in his prodigious artistic pedigree do we look? And do we see his roots as a blessing or burden?

We could start in Ukraine, where generations of Thomashefsky men were celebrated cantors, masters of the sacred songs for whom music had one purpose--expressing love of God.

Then came his immigrant grandparents, Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, who for half a century were icons of America’s Yiddish theater. Boris launched the nation’s very first Yiddish production in 1882, at age 13 or 16--depending on the account--while laboring in a New York cigar factory. He soon was taking the stage in tights and plumed hats to perform Yiddish versions of Shakespeare, musical farces or melodramas, riding in atop a horse if that’s what it took to win an audience, and always getting the girl.

Today, you see the theatricality of Boris’ shund productions every time his grandkid takes the podium with the San Francisco Symphony, looking like a stork with his light feet and vast wingspan, pumping a right fist to a trumpet player, or going on tiptoes and reaching a feathery left hand toward the heavens during a sublime moment of Shostakovich, or--as the audience applauds--departing right through the orchestra, then leaping from the upper level of the stage to the lower.

In trying to get a handle on the conductor known by three initials--”MTT”--others look to the man who was a surrogate father to him, Leonard Bernstein. It was three decades ago that the 20th century’s most successful American-born orchestra leader flung around the word “genius” and said of his protege: “He reminds me of me at that age except that he knows more.”

Then there’s MTT’s parents--his schoolteacher mom who hoped he’d be anything but a performer, and his father, Theodor Thomashefsky, who began in New York theater but found the family legacy too much, shortening his name to Ted Thomas and fleeing west. Ted wound up working on Roy Rogers cowboy serials and became fascinated by the Mojave Desert, where the serials were filmed.

Tilson Thomas thus grew up with a father whose passion was . . . cacti. Figure that out. MTT tries.

“I think a lot about what was obsessing them,” he says of the previous generations, “what they were pursuing, what were their demons.

“My grandmother”--Bessie--”she said, ‘You can’t give an impassioned performance unless you have a little raw material.’ That’s a powerful statement: You can’t really give witness to these emotional roller coaster rides of repertoire unless to some degree in your life you have lived those things.” It was not an offhand observation, for Tilson Thomas was preparing to lead the San Francisco Symphony on a national tour that would take him to places where he rode his own roller coaster. They’d start in New York, where he inherited Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts but also hit a low, in 1978: a drug arrest. They’d go to Boston, whose orchestra made him an instant sensation--as a 24-year-old fill-in--then cast him off.

And this week the tour reaches Los Angeles, where he was born 55 years ago and first established himself as a boy wonder. Five Southern California stops include a Wednesday night performance at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which might have been his musical home to this day, but which cast him off, too. He hasn’t been back there for 15 years.

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Before Beethoven’s Fifth, there’s pizza. The 104 musicians of the San Francisco Symphony assemble for lunch in the bowels of Davies Hall before rehearsing the piece that will be on five of the tour’s 14 programs, including the one in L.A. Tilson Thomas doesn’t avoid such musical staples. “People,” he notes, “want to hear them.”

But people also know they will hear something not so familiar with him. Thus this lunch: to tell his orchestra what he plans for its June American Mavericks Festival.

Before he became San Francisco’s music director in 1995, there already was a festival. All Beethoven. Every year.

But his festival was all-American from the start, the first featuring works of Bernstein, Copland and Cage and beginning with a headline-grabbing jam session with surviving members of the Grateful Dead. Tie-dyed Deadheads grooved on the electronic music of Edgard Varese.

Soon after, Tilson Thomas led his new orchestra to a Grammy Award for their debut recording together of Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet.” It’s been a love story here ever since.

“Right place, right time,” says the orchestra’s ponytailed principal pianist, Robin Sutherland. “California boy gets a California band at a time when boy needs band and band needs boy.”

The room quiets as the California boy takes the microphone. June’s program, he announces, will open with “Meet the Mavericks” night, climaxing in Minimalist pioneer Terry Riley’s “In C” performed by “the largest ensemble” ever: “We’ll invite members of the audience to come and play, to bring their instruments.”

There will be a tribute to the elder statesman of Bay Area composers, white-bearded Lou Harrison, who embraces musical techniques of Korea, China, Japan and Java--and the gongs and bells of the Indonesian gamelan.

Harrison had grown frustrated over the years as the symphony under previous conductor Herbert Blomstedt “ignored me.” Harrison jokes how he was about to issue a proclamation “prohibiting” the orchestra from playing his works. “Then, boom, here comes MTT.”

Tilson Thomas tells the musicians he wants to attract young people, even if many are drawn just by the idea of coming to a “maverick” concert, “how daring they think they are.”

Maybe something will sink in. Maybe they’ll come back.

Anyway, he concludes, “I think it’s a kick-ass program.”

With that, the orchestra applauds--until its executive director voices a cautionary note. “The unspoken elephant in the corner,” Brent Assink says, “is how are we going to sell tickets?”

MTT interjects, “Bring your friends. Take them for a drink after the show.”

“This could only work here,” Assink adds

“If not . . .” MTT interjects again, then finishes with a bit of shtick, giving a military salute, rolling his eyes up and buckling his knees, so he sinks into the sunset.

The musicians are still laughing as they head upstairs for the rehearsal. Minutes later, the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth everyone knows in their sleep--ta-ta-ta-TA--echoes through the concert hall and the comedy gives way to the hard work of being a world-class orchestra, three hours of hammering at nuance, tempo and balance. Like any conductor, MTT hums passages to suggest how they might be played. But he also throws out cryptic references testing their musical memory, as to a Tchaikovsky symphonic poem--”think ‘Francesca da Rimini’ “--to make a point about thematic transformation. He urges the violins to “whip it.” And he asks a question: “This incredibly beautiful landscape. What is this all about?”

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One history of Yiddish theater calls Boris Thomashefsky “the main interpreter of plays that appealed to the rabble,” a description his grandson endorses. The other leading Yiddish actor, Jacob P. Adler (father of acting guru Stella Adler), was more polished, having been a star in Europe. Boris came over as a child and geared his shows to the immigrant masses, with escapist tales set in their homelands or ones about adjusting to a new world where they toiled as peddlers and in sweatshops.

“This high-culture/low-culture thing seems to plague generation after generation,” MTT says. “It’s something my grandparents lived through and that, oddly enough, I seem to be. . . .

“It was considered in Yiddish theater that the shund plays, the lower music hall productions that reflected life on the streets, were not as important or dignified as the ‘literary’ theater. Yet from today’s perspective, the ‘literary’ plays seem impossibly long-winded and pretentious, a fancified conception of high art which had no soul. And the shund plays--not all, but sections--seem touching on something that had to do with the truth.”’

That reminds him of his early infatuation with certain highly intellectual avant-garde music that scoffed at tradition but “seemed to require so many explanations to the audience, so many manifestoes about what concept is being expressed.”

“I suddenly thought, ‘We left the people too far behind.’ ”

Rather than retreat to safer fare, he sought to identify the new music that could “go across the footlights and connect.” He also worked up his please-and-provoke formula for programs: “ideally three pieces, one which is diverting, one challenging and one reaffirming. It’s terribly important that something people see that night makes them think, ‘Yeah, this is why I went to the theater.’ ”

He’s speaking in the century-old, four-story Edwardian home he renovated with his manager and longtime partner, Joshua Robison, whom he knows from their days at North Hollywood High in the early ‘60s. Robison was a star gymnast, MTT a star on the Knowledge Bowl team that won consecutive L.A. titles.

But when Robison pulls out old yearbooks to look up some mutual friends with a visitor, Tilson Thomas retreats to a corner chair. By those years, he was far more into the adult music world than normal teen society. He says he felt some bond with the tennis players, who “stood alone, on one side of the net.”

The windows of his top-floor music room look out over the rooftops of Pacific Heights to San Francisco Bay and Alcatraz Island. Inside the house, everywhere, are mementos of his family: a scroll tracing the cantors back to the 1700s; posters of his grandparents in costume; a room full of Thomashefsky papers; and countless paintings by his father, landscapes and theater scenes. There’s also a room full of cacti, in pots, that he dug from his parents’ San Fernando Valley yard after they died in 1992.

One of the lessons of his ancestry is that talent and ambition do not easily translate into happiness.

Yes, his grandpa was a curly-haired matinee idol who, as one history said, “took his salary in gold, wore a money belt, had the first chauffeur-driven limousine among the luminaries of the Yiddish stage and employed a Japanese valet.” George Gershwin immortalized him in a song, “Down With Boris Thomashefsky.” Grandmother Bessie--whom Boris discovered as a 14-year-old seamstress--developed routines copied by Fanny Brice, vaudeville’s “Funny Girl.”

But the couple eventually split in a scandal worthy of today’s tabloids. They set up competing theaters and wrote rival autobiographies. And while their immigrant community produced figures who went on to define mainstream American culture--such as Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Copland--Boris found it hard to cross over.

He failed in attempts to bring Yiddish theater to Broadway, or to do English-speaking roles (“The Singing Rabbi”) , and died bankrupt in 1939, performing in a cabaret below the Second Avenue elevated train. Even so, thousands attended his funeral.

It was about that time that Grandma Bessie retired and moved to Hollywood, where she lived another quarter-century, well into MTT’s childhood. He recalls the flamboyant old woman holding court “with her red hair and cigarette holders and bracelet-covered arms,” not to mention her performance advice.

Tilson Thomas believes his father was just as “amazingly gifted” as the elder Thomashefskys--at painting or the piano, for example--but couldn’t stomach the frenzied public life that had taken such a toll on them. He held various jobs in TV and film--working with a cousin, actor Paul Muni, or as a writer and dialogue director--and exercised his real creativity in private. He created a Bohemian salon--and that desert botanical garden--at his home in the then-dusty Valley.

“His real focus turned to the desert. He had this great Yiddishkeit wonder about it,” MTT says. “That was the mix in my childhood. Cactus gardens and citrus groves and lots of Yiddish actors and extras from cowboy movies.”

His mother had been an assistant to the Roosevelt administration advisor who coined the term New Deal. After marrying Ted, she established the research department at Columbia Pictures, then became an English and social studies teacher. “Since everybody on my father’s side were borderline crazies,” he recalls, “she always said, ‘It’s only thanks to me that you come out with any normal ability to get on with life.’ ”

She just wished he would spend his as a scientist--enough of that arts insanity.

*

At 3, he was plunked before a piano. By 5, he could play by ear. By grade school, he was aloof from his peers, preferring musical scores. By 10, he was at USC Prep, where teacher Dorothy Bishop showed students how “an instrument could become an extension of themselves.” By 12, he had his first tuxedo, inherited from grandma’s costume trunk. By 13, he had his musical epiphany, listening to Mahler and “getting it.” By 19, he was conducting L.A.’s Youth Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra and soon the full Los Angeles Philharmonic, for youth concerts.

By then he was at USC proper, a beneficiary of a wartime musical migration to the city. He accompanied violist Jascha Heifetz and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky at master classes and was a regular--on piano and conducting--at Laurence Morton’s Monday Evening Concerts. Stravinsky might be in the first row.

Composer William Kraft recalls a night when Tilson Thomas played one of his pieces that borrowed a passage from Liszt, with a pause ending on a single note. A natural at “making the most” of a moment, MTT “took a huge loop with his hand, a great gesture as far as his arm would reach, so you expected a thunderous sound and . . . just nothing.” It broke up the house.

He was intrigued by more than the music of his elders. Pianist Ralph Grierson, a classmate, says he and MTT believed “it was possible to be a serious musician about all kinds of music.” They experimented with synthesizers and waited eagerly for the latest Beatles album. They were in awe of how James Brown sequenced songs in “Live at the Apollo.”

Yet not everyone took to the precocious young man. “People misunderstood sometimes his enthusiasm,” is how Grierson puts it, “and reacted negatively.”

It didn’t help that he was moody, capable of tantrums. Kraft, a former Los Angeles Philharmonic percussionist, saw the tension when the shaggy-haired kid explained Stravinsky to musicians twice his age, “egos that don’t like to be dominated,” before a youth concert.

Rehearsing “The Firebird” before lunch one time, he instructed the orchestra to “do it again.” The first horn player asked, “The finale?” No, MTT said, “from the top.” The whole horn section walked out.

So what? He seemed destined to leave them behind for the heights of the Eastern arts establishment after he won the Berkshire Music Festival’s Koussevitzky Prize and met Bernstein in 1968.

The “next Bernstein” talk began the moment Tilson Thomas joined the Boston Symphony as an assistant conductor the following year and 10 days later had to take over the orchestra in mid-concert--at Lincoln Center--after 70-year-old William Steinberg fell ill. It was the same Hollywood scenario that had thrust Bernstein to prominence with the New York Philharmonic a quarter-century before. Both were of Russian-Jewish stock, pianists, uninhibited performers and gay, even if neither of them advertised that in those times.

Before long, Lenny was urging the Boston Symphony to name Tilson Thomas its principal conductor, whatever his age. But after an initial infatuation with his energy, the musicians began to resist him, suggesting he was immature--and threatening a revolt if he was appointed.

So Tilson Thomas’ first musical directorship, in 1971, was in . . . Buffalo.

Bernstein did get him TV exposure, turning over the famous Young People’s concerts to him from 1971 to 1977, but that introduced him to New York’s disco-hopping crowd. At Kennedy Airport, a small amount of cocaine, three marijuana cigarettes, and 3 1/2 amphetamine tablets were found in his bag. Though he plea-bargained down to a $150 fine, the episode made him reassess a lifestyle that had given ammunition to those who thought him too brash and arrogant, calling orchestras “old fossils.” He’d have to prove anew he was a “committed musician.”

He hoped to do that back home. During 1981-85, he was principal guest conductor for the L.A. Philharmonic. Still no mellow violin, he once stormed off the Hollywood Bowl stage for half an hour--winning applause--to protest noise from a police helicopter.

Inevitably, his ego clashed with that of Ernest Fleischmann, the orchestra’s longtime, imperial executive director. Fleischmann now says he did “fantastic things” injecting vitality into music but was “not as consistent” as he might have been. “It was probably a bit too early.”

When the musical directorship opened up, it went to Andre Previn.

For the onetime wunderkind, things weren’t exactly following the script.

“There were times I felt, ‘What a fool I was!’ ” Tilson Thomas recalls. He had stepped so naturally on the fast track, “this intoxicating process of self-congratulation” that mandated you “build the biggest career you could in as many arenas” and play orchestras, cities--or countries--against each other to position yourself as “a mega-corporate kind of artist.”

He settled into a nomad’s existence, jetting to guest conducting gigs from Europe to Japan. He also found himself listening to reassurances that life, in his line of work, begins at 50. A fortuneteller told him that. So did Artur Rubinstein. The legendary pianist swore he couldn’t play Chopin worth a damn until that age.

“Rubinstein took me out for lunch. He said, ‘You’re searching. It will not be easy. You will doubt certain things. But one day, it will fall in place,’ ” Tilson Thomas says.

It took another decade. In 1987, he was named music director of the London Symphony, giving him a home base where he had no baggage--and could learn to win the trust of musicians. He also showed he might well be Bernstein’s successor as a musical Pied Piper, founding the New World Symphony in Miami for young musicians out of conservatory.

Then his personal safety net was shredded. Bernstein died in 1990, his parents two years later, within months of each other. Boyish as he looked, his rock star hair--parted in the middle--was showing gray.

“When my parents passed on, it was like, I’ve got to come back to the United States for all sorts of reasons, to hold on to my identity as an American and, as it turned out, as a West Coast person.”

He’d conducted the San Francisco Symphony once in his 20s (for Mahler’s Ninth) and began guesting regularly. By the time Blomstedt retired in 1995, the orchestra made clear--by a vote--whom it wanted.

*

Five years later, the musicians worry. “Everyone’s looking for conductors,” says violist Geraldine Walter, “and we hope he doesn’t go.”

American symphonies are in for a game of musical chairs. Prestigious podiums are coming vacant in Boston, New York and Philadelphia. “Clearly he is going to be considered,” says Sutherland, the keyboardist.

The players know that MTT will have to pick up the phone if New York or Boston want to talk. But Sutherland hopes his boss--and friend--sees he has a unique fit here in a city “on some sort of edge” that doesn’t question his theatricality, appreciates a mix of Mozart and Metallica and is tickled by his Visa commercials, seeing the substance under his sizzle.

“Tilson Thomas has built an audience that now seems willing and ready to follow him anywhere,” was how the San Francisco Examiner music critic, Allan Ulrich, summed it up last year.

“Do you really believe,” he wrote, “that New York would sit still for John Cage, Edgard Varese, Giacinto Scelsi or Igor Stravinsky festivals?”

Such a question may have run through MTT’s mind the first night of the tour, Feb. 22, at Carnegie Hall. He gave the New York audience one of his typically varied programs: a lesser-known Copland (“Inscape”) followed by classical Top 10 (Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1) then a contemporary piece by Berkeley’s John Adams (“Harmonielehre”).

The Tchaikovsky, no surprise, drew a standing ovation and demand for two encores by guest pianist Arcadi Volodos. The young Russian had gotten the same reaction playing it a week before with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

In California, however, the Tchaikovsky closed the program. In New York, with MTT’s orches

tra, it came before intermission. The result? A noticeable portion of the high-priced seats--perhaps 20%--were empty for the Adams. Those concertgoers had donned their furs and cashmere coats at the break and left.

They never gave a chance to the Adams piece that MTT considers “our classic music now--not ‘new music.’ ” They never discovered why the remaining audience gave him and his crew another ovation, at the end.

Perhaps more might have stayed had the concert taken place a day later, after the news that the San Francisco band and its leader had won three more Grammys, for their Stravinsky CD set, honored as best classical album, orchestral performance and engineered recording.

A few days later, they played the same program in Boston and most all the audience hung around for the piece by Adams--who was born in nearby Worcester--and seemed to get it, demanding encores after that work, as well as the Tchaikovsky.

MTT was reminded how his crowds back in San Francisco by now pack the house for an Ives symphony, say, without any boost from an old favorite. “I cannot imagine any other place in the world right now where I could do this as intensively,” he says.

He insists, “I’m planning to stay. I’m certainly not out politicking.”

He senses a shifting balance of power with his success in San Francisco and that of Esa-Pekka Salonen in L.A., a situation that has eased some the bitterness over his departure from the Philharmonic.

“In both San Francisco and Los Angeles, there’s the opportunity to do something extraordinary,” he says, “something more adventurous, more engaging than what seems to be existing in many places on the East Coast.”

So this is what he’d like to do: keep the groove going in S.F.; do more conducting in smaller halls “where you can hear the bow noise”; create more special programs, like art museums do; figure out ways to make classical music an “impulse buy”; compose more himself; keep that “sense of wondrousness.”

*

Not that he feels at home in San Francisco--or anywhere--in any conventional sense. His only sense of place, he says, is “wherever I am in the music.”

He can remember where he was at “breakthrough moments” when he suddenly understood a piece, like Mahler’s Ninth. “It’s mine!” But he feels no emotional tether, he says, even to his hometown of Los Angeles.

He does feel a connection to his family. Which brings us to the Thomashefsky Project.

Targeted for completion in 2001, it is designed to “collate all existing materials” relating to the clan and its “era of theatrical history.” Some of the artifacts--such as old scripts and songs--already fill most of a room in his house. The former executive director of the Jewish Museum of San Francisco has been hired as curator.

“It’s a way,” Tilson Thomas says, “of understanding my family better and therefore understanding myself better as part of this continuum.”

This legacy is no casual matter for an only child who will not be having children.

It’s struck him that this may be his destiny: “that I was supposed to be the last one and bring certain things to concord, to resolve certain issues . . . and check out.”

What issues? The high-versus-low culture thing, the balance of shtick and the sacred that his grandparents groped to achieve. Or understanding that look on his father’s face--and his own--when the old man once came to hear him record a tune by an old family friend, Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”

“We’re both smiling and we have the saddest-looking eyes you’ve ever seen. I said, ‘Dad, what does it mean?’ He nodded and said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s the expression.’ You feel this enormous gratefulness and sadness at the same time.”

If he can’t help revisiting sadness, he remembers what his grandmother said: Take comfort in how you can use it.

Which brings him back to Beethoven--and that Fifth Symphony he and the orchestra will play Wednesday night in Los Angeles. How does Beethoven get from that famous beginning, expressing such rage and anger, to the end, which is so jubilant?

MTT dwells on the moment just before Beethoven goes around that final corner to ecstasy, when he’s still trying so hard--too hard--to find the answer. All at once, “by accident, he discovers the key that takes him through those portals of happiness.”

He asks, “What is it that Beethoven knows at the end that he didn’t at the beginning?”

His answer, “It’s right here. Right now.”

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Michael Tilson Thomas conducts the San Francisco Symphony today, 3 p.m., Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, $15-$55, (949) 553-2422, and Wednesday, 8 p.m., Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., $18-$70. (213) 365-3500.