The famous conductor Thomas gets rid of his obligations after his illness, but comes to Prague
After 34 years, American conductor Michael Tilson Thomas will end up leading the New World Symphony student orchestra, in which he has been helping young musicians at the beginning of their careers since 1988. The AP agency reported that the doctors were looking for a malignant brain tumor in a seventy-year-old conductor last August.
Since then, 12 Grammy Awards have conducted about twenty performances by the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and its former home, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. In June, May lead three times Czech Philharmonic.
“Being able to make music with so many great artists and friends in a publication was like coming home, going back to life. I can’t imagine what could make me happier,” the conductor looks back. On the other hand, working at the New World Symphony involves a lot of administrative duties and, above all, requires a lot of commitment. Thomas doesn’t know if he can keep him after the disease. “I have to consider well what workload and what demands I will be able to meet now,” he concludes.
Doctors diagnosed him with one of the most aggressive forms of cancer. “It has been stopped at the moment. But the future is unclear,” he admits. He will continue to work for the student orchestra only in the role of artistic director emeritus and collaborate on selected projects.
The New World Symphony is made up of graduates of prestigious music universities, with around 1,500 applicants applying each year. Since 2010, the institution has been housed in a modern building designed by architect Frank Gehry. In the past, the Czech conductor Marek Štilec collaborated with the orchestra under Thomas’s direction. “He can ingeniously motivate everyone around him. Working with him means seeing and getting the best out of him,” Štilec said in an interview with Hudební rozhledy magazine.
Conductor and pianist Michael Tilson Thomas has Jewish roots after his grandparents, the ancestors came from the Ukrainian style. In the 1970s and 1980s, he worked with orchestras in Buffalo and Los Angeles, USA, but is most closely associated with two ensembles: the London Symphony Orchestra, of which he was chief conductor from 1988 to 1995, and especially the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. He led from 1995 to the year before last and brought it to the world level.
Under his leadership, the San Francisco Philharmonic performed the classical romantic repertoire as well as the works of modern and contemporary composers, especially those of the American and often non-conformist. The work of the orchestra could also be appreciated again by the Czechs, when Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra came to the Prague Spring Festival in 2003, 2007, 2011 and most recently in 2014.
The San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, led by Michael Tilson Thomas, plays an adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. | Video: San Francisco Symphony
Thomas is famous for his interpretations of Gustav Mahler’s works, recording all nine of his symphonies with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.
Two parts In 2009, he shot his Mahler documentary project Keeping Score, which he freely followed up on Leonard Bernstein’s popularization cycles in the Czech Republic. The Jihlava singing association Campanula thus performs in the documentary, and Thomas himself visited Jihlava and Mahler’s birth house in Kaliště u Humpolec with a camera.
“He wondered if little Gustav Mahler, who lived in Jihlava until he was fifteen, could hear the guests singing from the lower inn to his upper room. So we had to try everything at Gustav Mahler’s house in Jihlava,” he recalled three years ago in In musical perspectives, musicologist Jiří Štilec, according to whom Thomas always tries to penetrate all the details and contexts of the work, and so, in addition to the score, he also studies secondary sources of inspiration.
Thomas presented his documentary about Mahler in 2011 at the Evald cinema in Prague. On that occasion, he recalled meeting his composer, Alma Mahler’s widow, as a child.
“I was about eleven. She came to a Los Angeles antiquarian that belonged to my godfather. He introduced me to the fact that I was learning to play the piano. And even though Alma was old then, she immediately started flirting,” he said. “She adjusted the scarf to make her profile stand out and assured me in a pleasant voice that I was sure to grow into a conductor. She was playful, even provocative. This meeting then changed my view of the first movement of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, which depicts Alma. Mostly “It’s slow, but my concept is tumultuous. It’s Alma,” he added.
With the exception of Mahler, the conductor was interested in visiting Antonín Dvořák, Zdeněk Fibich or Jan Ladislav Dusík during his visits to the Czech Republic.
Thomas also composes, creates compositions dedicated to the Holocaust, Anne Frank, the explosion of the nuclear bomb in Hiroshima or poems by Emily Dickinson. He has also written in popular music – collaborating with jazz-rock guitarist John McLaughlin, songwriter Elvis Costell or the band Metallica, which recorded two albums with San Francisco symphonies. Thomas conducted the second S & M2 of the Philharmonic.
Michael Tilson Thomas recalls meeting Alma Mahler. Record from the Prague Spring Festival, 2011. | Video: Prague Spring
The Czechs will soon hear Michael Tilson Thomas again, and from June 8 to 10 she will have three performances in the Prague Rudolfinum with the Czech Philharmonic.
The program includes the half-hour originally ballet music of the Appalachian Spring by Aaron Copland, a classic of modern American music from 1944, which he will perform in his own version, and in the second half of the evening, Schubert’s Symphony in C major, sometimes known as the Great Symphony.