Michael’s gift
For 25 years, MTT’s presence made the San Francisco Symphony a bedrock of excellence
I had a collection of short reviews from the past week lined up, in varying states of incompleteness, when the news of Michael Tilson Thomas’s death on Wednesday night upended everything. It’s a huge, almost incalculable loss — to the Bay Area, to the greater musical world, and to you and me personally. No matter whether you attended concerts by the San Francisco Symphony — no matter whether you even cared that much about classical music in the first place — MTT was a cultural landmark the likes of which a city is blessed with all too rarely. Both locally and internationally, he represented San Francisco on the musical stage, and we stood with him. His triumphs were our triumphs, his setbacks our own. We haven’t even begun yet to reckon up the magnitude of the loss.
I feel like I’ve been writing stock-taking essays about MTT and his legacy for nearly a decade: when he announced his retirement from the Symphony after an unprecedented 25 years as music director; when his final season began in 2019 and then months later when it came to a sorrowful close in the middle of the Covid shutdown; as he began to withdraw from performing; and then of course this week. I think I’ve said almost everything I have to say about him and his artistic genius, although you never know. He contained multitudes.
But I do want to add one final note of gratitude on a very personal level. I spent more than 35 years as a classical music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, and my career there was a constant source of joy and stimulation, of intellectual challenge and aesthetic delights. That fact was attributable above all to MTT’s presence in San Francisco. More than any of the editors and colleagues I had at the paper, more than any of the other artists and organizations that have helped make the Bay Area a paradise for lovers of classical music, Michael directly shaped the rhythms of my work life for decades. Because of him, the number one part of my job description — go to Davies Symphony Hall every week and report back — became an adventure, not an obligation. It was like having the world’s greatest boss, except without the staff meetings and performance reviews.
It didn’t have to be that way. Now and again, I’m visited by dark musings about how easily things could have taken a different turn. When the Symphony management was looking for Herbert Blomstedt’s successor in the early ’90s, unconfirmed but plausible rumors suggested that MTT was one of two top contenders. The other was a conductor who was well thought of in some musical circles, but whom I considered an egregious hack. (Don’t look now, but I think the conventional wisdom may have caught up with me a little in the intervening years.) Had the choice gone the other way, I would have been in for at least a decade of weekly frustration.
Instead, I got to spend week after week watching and listening as MTT worked his magic. Was everything he and the orchestra did together successful? Of course not. Did I deliver some outright pans over the years? Obviously — sometimes even with relish. But it was all predicated on the fact that I knew what a brilliantly gifted and thoughtful artist he was. If this week’s subscription program didn’t come off as planned, there was always next week — which I’d start looking forward to as soon as the current review was done.
This was MTT’s gift to me, but not only to me. You reaped the same benefit. Everyone in the Bay Area could make that trip to Davies and know that something beautiful and exciting was almost certainly in store. We shared that adventure together. Who even knows when we’ll have such a chance again.
In the sweet midsummer
Everything else I had in the hopper can either wait until next week or just fall by the wayside. But I can’t pass up the opportunity to tell you about the wonderful production of Benjamin Britten’s 1960 opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream that Pocket Opera has put together, which has one last performance scheduled on Sunday.
This opera, like Shakespeare’s play, boasts an intriguing blend of capaciousness and intimacy. It’s a mechanism with so many moving parts that it can’t help feeling big; as the action shifts from the fairies to the high-born mortals to the rude mechanicals and back again, you get the sense of a vast theatrical geography (forests, in the folkloric imagination, are basically infinite). At the same time, though, the entire enterprise teeters precariously on moonbeams and spiderwebs; blow on it too hard and everything scatters.
For this occasion, Pocket Opera has committed fully to the gossamer side of things. With the blessings of the Britten estate, the company commissioned a chamber version of the opera. Orchestrator Liam Daley slimmed Britten’s canny full-orchestra score down to a 13-piece instrumental ensemble, keeping the musical material intact but attenuating the instrumental textures almost to the breaking point.
To be candid, I was a little apprehensive about the project. The balance of weight and translucency is already baked into Britten’s score, and any more thinning, I feared, would run the risk of reducing it to something scarcely recognizable. I was wrong. In this world-premiere production, the newly slender accompaniment, deftly led by conductor David Drummond, joined forces with Nicolas A. Garcia’s hilariously detailed direction to make the opera into something as close-up and cozy as a bedtime story.
It helped, too, that the large cast was uniformly skilled and charming during Sunday’s performance. Countertenor Kyle Tingzon — who has suddenly become a ubiquitous and welcome presence on Bay Area stages — gave a radiant performance as the fairy king Oberon, his singing at once weighty and mellifluous. He was ably matched by soprano Chelsea Hollow as Tytania and by bass Kirk Eichelberger as a booming, rambunctious Nick Bottom. As the four lovelorn Athenians, Ellen Leslie, Leah Finn, Kevin Gino, and Spencer Dodd channeled their desire and frustration into singing marked by nobility and wit. And others, all strong but too numerous to mention (this opera really does have a lot of roles).
Perhaps most heartening of all is that this version of the opera — like the countless English translations of company founder Donald Pippin — now becomes an asset that can be passed around to other companies eager to stage the piece, but leery of the associated costs. If A Midsummer Night’s Dream gets the wider exposure it deserves, that’s a boon that goes far beyond a single staging.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Pocket Opera. 1:30 p.m. April 26, San Francisco Legion of Honor. www.pocketopera.org.
Cryptic clue of the week
From Out of Left Field #316 by Henri Picciotto and me, sent to subscribers last Thursday:
Annual salary’s ending in advance (6)
Last week’s clue:
Trumpeter is like some tea: fresh (4,6)
Solution: HERB ALPERT
Trumpeter: definition
Like some tea: HERBAL
fresh: PERT
Coming up
• New Century Chamber Orchestra: Guitarist Pablo Sáinz-Villegas joins the orchestra for a pair of instrumental showpieces: Joaquin Rodrigo’s perennial Concierto de Aranjuez and Michael Daugherty’s Bay of Pigs. Standing in for injured music director Daniel Hope is violinist Blake Poulioit, who leads a program that includes a commissioned world premiere by Henry Dorn alongside music by Astor Piazzolla and Alberto Williams. April 24, First Presbyterian Church, Berkeley. April 25, Presidio Theatre. www.ncco.org.
• The Tallis Scholars: Easter is already in the rear-view mirror, but there’s no reason we can’t still enjoy a little liturgical celebration. The venerable early-music ensemble, led by founding director Peter Phillips, offers a seasonal program built around Victoria’s Missa O magnum mysterium. Filling out the lineup is music by other Renaissance masters, including Giaches de Wert and Jacobus Gallus, as well as a more recent offering from Arvo Pärt. April 24, First Congregational Church, Berkeley. www.calperformances.org.
• Wooden Fish Ensemble: Three of the Bay Area’s longtime instrumental heroes — cellist Thalia Moore, bassist Richard Worn, and pianist Thomas Schultz — collaborate on a chamber recital headlined by Schubert’s luminous “Arpeggione” Sonata. Also on the program are two world premieres by Hyo-Shin Na, as well as music by Louis Moreau Gottschalk. April 26, Old First Church. www.oldfirstconcerts.org.
Wonderful article, Hannah! For classical music to thrive, young musicians and audiences must be developed. MTT committed himself to that proposition, as did his great mentor, Leonard Bernstein.
MTT <3 If only we could watch his Keeping Score series again. Alas it has gone offline.
I'm curious, I discovered KUSC FM radio during a painful and lengthy internet outage in our building last December. What a find. I just learned MTT attended USC. Was MTT's legacy that station, or the reverse (chicken or egg question)