Wilkins: ‘Demonstrate you’re vulnerable’

Thomas Wilkins, 51, shares Tovey’s gift for being able to shrink the Bowl down to size. He deeply impressed Borda and the Philharmonic staff when he spoke to the Bowl audience at last August’s “Tchaikovsky Spectacular.”

“He has an ability to look at popular culture and be completely comfortable in the vernacular,” Borda says. “That’s a real requirement for the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.”

“I look people in their faces when I’m talking to them,” Wilkins said by phone from Omaha. “I know to look up sometimes, especially at the Bowl. If it looks like I’m only talking to the first two or three rows, then you lose a connection. It’s especially important to demonstrate that you’re human and vulnerable.”

Like Tovey, Wilkins hopes to create a performance atmosphere without barriers of protocol, tradition or what he calls “a preconceived belief in requisite knowledge.”

“That’s my goal in life: to get people to fall in love with music and not be intimidated in the process,” he said. “It informs everything I do onstage.”

The value of preparing an audience for a particular work recently came home to Wilkins while he was rehearsing Webern’s atypical, Straussian “Im Sommerwin.”

It occurred to him that the piece was written just months before the composer studied with Schoenberg. “So I was thinking, ‘The next time the audience sees another Webern work on the program, they’re going to run to it. And it’s going to be nothing like the piece they heard.’ ”

Let’s get the kids involved

ALSO like Tovey, Wilkins (who coincidentally can play the tuba as well) had a less than privileged upbringing, as the child of a single mother in a housing project, that keeps him centered. A trained cellist, he didn’t have a private lesson until he got to college.

Yet he said that after being taken to hear the Norfolk (now Virginia) Symphony when he was 8, he decided on the spot that he wanted to be a conductor.

“All of my critical life choices -- like who I hung out with, what I did with my spare time and whether I could dream of going to college -- all of those ques- tions were answered for me by default, because I had fallen in love with music,” he said.

As self-described “poster child for the value of music education in the schools,” Wilkins said he’s always looking for opportunities to inspire children.

“I’m kind of a zealot when it comes to the importance of painting a doorway onto a brick wall for a kid and using music as the tool” to break through, he said. “I don’t care if kids grow up to be professional musicians. It’s just opening those doors to self-awareness, possibility, hope and a life.”

Although he sees himself as “essentially a classical conductor,” Wilkins said he prefers variety. “Last season, I had as much fun at the Bowl with Pink Martini as I did doing an all-Tchaikovsky concert two weeks earlier.

“They’re two different languages, both profound in their own way,” he said. “Think of what happened with Miles Davis and the ‘Birth of the Cool.’

“Because he had fallen in love with Ravel and Fauré, all this extra color found its way into his music. Don’t you think that if Mozart heard some of our good jazz or pop music, he would have dug it?”