Tilson Thomas Makes Return to L.A. a Masterful Occasion

In March 1985, John Adams completed and the San Francisco Symphony premiered and recorded “Harmonielehre.” The importance of that premiere, precisely 15 years ago, did not escape audiences, musicians or critics. The 40-minute, three-movement orchestral score (in essence, a great American symphony) was immediately recognized as a breakthrough piece for a young composer (Adams was 38 at the time) and for American music.

The thrilling rhythmic opening chords, shot out like cannon fire, were inspired by a dream of a huge tanker rising out of the San Francisco Bay. The symphony then goes on to synthesize several of the fractious American century’s musical impulses, as bouncy, brilliant Minimalism meets Schoenbergian Expressionism (the title is a homage to Schoenberg’s famous harmony textbook). It is thrilling music of a new beginning--for composer, for the musical life of the Bay Area, for American music.

But just as Adams was rising like that tanker in the bay on the American scene, a great hope for American music, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, seemed stuck on the shoals down the coast in Los Angeles, his genius unfulfilled. 1985 was the last and most uneven of his four years as principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Wednesday night, Tilson Thomas set foot on the podium of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for the first time since then. He returned in triumph conducting the San Francisco Symphony, of which he has been music director for five years, in an astounding performance of “Harmonielehre,” and with it two important strands of American music significantly came together.

“Harmonielehre” has hardly been neglected. If not exactly a repertory work, it is getting there. It has had a second recording--by Simon Rattle, who was competing co-principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic with Tilson Thomas--and it gets many performances. But it is, I think, safe to say that no conductor has yet found in it the depth that Tilson Thomas has.

The complaint most often heard about Tilson Thomas in his Los Angeles Philharmonic years was his attention to the glittering surface of music. The same complaint has, at times, been leveled against Adams. But glittering surfaces--the dazzling sparkle, say, of a tropical sea on a brilliant day--can also serve to make us want to dive in.

One of the instantly attractive aspects of “Harmonielehre” is its prismatic refractions of orchestral color, and it is under these waves of glossy, radiantly tinted sound that Tilson Thomas’ performance makes it points. He, for instance, shapes that deep, lumbering melody of the rusty old tanker rising from the bay with a nostalgic warmth and richness, as though showing us the beauty in something old when seen in a new light.

The other images in “Harmonielehre” are of impotence (Amfortas’ wound in the Grail legend) and of transcendence (Adams’ baby, nicknamed Quackie, riding through space on the shoulders of medieval mystic Meister Eckhardt). Tilson Thomas reached the heights of Mahlerian convulsion in “Part II: The Amfortas Wound” and then produced an extraordinarily ethereal release in the downright angelic glitter of “Part III: Meister Eckhardt and Quackie.”

The first half of the program had further important points to prove. Tilson Thomas began with “Inscape,” Aaron Copland’s last major work. Written in 1967 for the 125th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic, it was recorded by Leonard Bernstein at the time of its premiere and a few years later with the Czech Philharmonic conducted by Copland, but it has never, like most of Copland’s late work, caught on. Its style is harsh--the 67-year-old composer had seemingly abandoned his populist style and returned to his Modernist roots in an apparent attempt to keep current with the 12-tone fashion of the day.

Tilson Thomas revealed in “Inscape,” though, something missing in the performances by Bernstein and Copland by making the crashing opening 11-note chord sound neither as stern as Copland did nor as angry as Bernstein but exciting, nose-thumbing fun instead. And he showed the contrasting calm harmonies and melodic two-part contrapuntal sections to contain some of that mystical glow of open spaces found in works such as “Appalachian Spring,” but here made more fragile and introspective.

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was also on the program. Tilson Thomas has been, for several years, honing his Beethoven to a workable compromise between the quick chamber music style of period practice and the broader symphonic tradition. There were no revelations here, but it was a careful, thoughtful performance. Details were clear, and Tilson Thomas propelled the famous work in a large single arc of tension and release (not unlike what he accomplished in the Adams).

The audience, large and enthusiastic, was explosive at the end and simply wouldn’t let the conductor off the stage without an encore (Grieg’s “The Last Spring”). The feeling was what it must have been like for Bostonians when Bernstein returned to his native city to conduct--maybe it couldn’t have been otherwise, but nevertheless, we let the big one get away.