MTT, still growing

Last month, Michael Tilson Thomas turned 60. “I can’t believe it” has been a common reaction. Common, but not altogether kind.

Unlike for most of us, for MTT, as he likes to be called, being thought eternally youthful can be a backhanded compliment. It’s a reminder of how long it has taken one of the most gifted musicians of our time to leverage and live up to his gifts, of just how extended were his wunderkind and wunder-adolescent years, how problematic the road to wunder-adulthood. Incredulity implies doubt. If not now, at 60, when?

Friday night at Davies Symphony Hall, Tilson Thomas, who is also celebrating his 10th anniversary as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, left no question as to what kind of a conductor he has become. He led a large orchestra, chorus and four vocal soloists in a commandingly effusive, warm and monumental performance of Janacek’s “Glagolitic” Mass, a weird Slavic rite with blistering brass, an out-of-control organ part, roller-coaster orchestral lurches and sensationally dramatic and mystical roles for chorus and soloists. It was music-making thrilling in the moment but also so aurally engulfing that it left a Janacek afterglow that lasted many euphoric hours.

Thursday night will be Tilson Thomas’ moment as a magnet for glamour when he oversees a birthday gala with his orchestra for San Francisco society that is scheduled to include three celebrated divas: Renee Fleming, Audra McDonald and Frederica von Stade. Next Wednesday, deadly serious, he will arrive at Walt Disney Concert Hall with the San Franciscans for Mahler’s death-obsessed Ninth Symphony, which they will also perform in Costa Mesa, Palm Desert and Santa Barbara.

Still, Friday’s concert offered a portrait of an artist at 60 remarkable but still incomplete.

It showed off several of Tilson Thomas’ musical sides. There was MTT the educator (he is founder of the New World Symphony, the professional training orchestra in Miami) and adventurer: The program began with an endearing series of didactic violin duets by the late Italian composer Luciano Berio. Each was performed by a member of the orchestra’s violin section joined by a young violinist from the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra.

With the orchestra’s first performance of “Island Music,” a 30-minute percussion sextet, MTT the composer and Californian arrived. The score, which was written two years ago and influenced by the late California composer Lou Harrison, has a musical language large enough to encompass the sounds of Bali and -- in a nod to MTT’s having grown up in L.A. and always having been entranced by its pop scene -- James Brown.

Finally, the Janacek Mass revealed MTT the conductor who leaves his heart exposed on his sleeve and who likes to make a splash. Along with the glorious performance came proof that Tilson Thomas has made the San Francisco Symphony one of the most impressive orchestras in the land.

There was not, on this occasion, MTT the terrific pianist, MTT the loquacious and often lyrical musical explicator, MTT the very funny mimic, MTT the this and MTT the that. But it was plenty for one concert.

All these talents, however, along with Tilson Thomas’ inherent theatricality, are more than enough to raise suspicions. The suspicion that a musician can’t do too many things well dogged the multi-sided careers of Mahler, Leonard Bernstein and John Cage. Similarly, William Bolcom, Pierre Boulez, Meredith Monk and Esa-Pekka Salonen must prove themselves all over again with every performance, new piece or new project.

For Tilson Thomas, the proving has been especially difficult. A teenager whose playing of late Beethoven piano sonatas impressed Stravinsky became a young conductor who seemed able not only to do it all but also to know it all, which turned on some players but turned off others. A life in the fast lane led to professional detours. An emotionality on the podium, allied with a certain insecurity when things didn’t go well (as they didn’t always during the mid- 1980s, when he was a principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic), could make him seem flippant.

Not all sides of his musical personality developed with equal rapidity. He hasn’t gotten over trying too hard, as a recent overproduced DVD he made with the San Francisco Symphony demonstrates (although it does include an outstanding performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony). Slowest to ripen has been his composing.

MTT can be an inspired fashioner of jaunty tunes, of touching or witty songs. But where, for instance, is that symphony he was going to write some summers ago?

“Island Music” is a fairly large work for Tilson Thomas, and a moving one. Created for two solo marimba players and a backup of four more percussionists, it is a meditation on Indonesian music, which is actually a very California thing (what with Colin McPhee and Harrison as precursors).

One of those compulsively jaunty MTT tunes, this time with Bali overtones, goes to town. The idea came, Tilson Thomas wrote in the program note, during a vacation on the island. But somber thoughts, insecurities, invade. Where he might rumba, Tilson Thomas ruminates. Brightness returns but, as in Mahler, of its own doing. The sun shines and you can’t stop it.

What made this feel so moving Friday was, of course, history. No one in Davies Hall could have missed the connection between this music and the news of what had happened to the people of Indonesia the previous week. But this is also authentic music that understands that paradise is the flip side of hell; we can’t have one without the other.

“Island Music” is not, though, a breakthrough piece. As a composer, MTT is a young 60. But his inspired performance of Janacek’s Mass could be read as a sign. Janacek himself didn’t really find his voice until he was around 60, and then there was no stopping him.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into a great performance, but the fervor that Tilson Thomas brought to the “Glagolitic” seemed a celebration of a continuing capacity to grow.

So happy 60th, MTT. And here’s hoping you’ll make us believe it.