SFist Interviews: Michael Tilson Thomas
Henry Brant, left, and MTT, right, during rehearsals of Ice Field in 2001. MTT will conduct Brant's orchestration of Ives' Concord Sonata this week with the SF Symphony.
Yet, the musicians play together and the shape of the music comes out wonderfully in full detail; it's a tight ship. So much so that they'll have to expand the mantlepiece for another three Grammy awards for their latest recording of the Mahler Cycle. We just had a phone conversation with MTT, and we now understand there is another side of him: a strictly business, straight to the point, no-fussiness-allowed persona. If what we see on the podium is the velvet glove, there is a strong firm hand underneath that knows how and when to take control.
We were hoping to have a wide ranging state-of-the-symphony conversation, but MTT was intensely studying the score for Charles Ives' Concord Symphony at the time, and kindly but firmly steered us in that direction. Ives is one of his favorite composers, a true American original who was the subject of one of the Keeping Scores episodes. And what a subject: he worked at an insurance company by day, and wrote music in his spare time. Since he had the financial stability of a day job, he did not care about publishing his music or having it performed. He could musically innovate without fearing the wrath of flustered audiences and narrow-minded critics. Eventually the world caught up with his inventions and now Ives is part of the classical canon. His towering achievement is the piano Sonata No. 2, "Concord, Mass." So monumental is the piece that Henry Brant decided to orchestrate the piano score as a symphony for a 100 piece orchestra.This is the version the SF Symphony will play tonight through Saturday, for the very first time.
The SF Symphony received another three Grammy awards for its Mahler 8th, bring the total for the Mahler Cycle to seven. Congratulations! How would you characterize your approach to Mahler, what makes it sound fresh and award-worthy?
I spent a lot of time with the music and a lot of time looking at the sources in the music. I look at all kinds of music of the time, cabaret music, military band music, all the flavors that this kind of music have. Then I try bring out those characteristic and pungencies.
You are approaching the music within this historical context. Would it be possible to consider the score on its own without this context?
It's just the way I work. My family for several generations was in theater, and as in Stanislavsky, in the same way your prepare for theater, you have to come up with a subtext. "What is it about? What does it refer to?" To be a performer on stage, it helps very much to have this subtext. And that's what I encourage others to do.
I have taken the same approach with Ives. I've studies Ives for a great deal of my life. Ives as well refers a lot to various kinds of vernacular music, hymns, folks songs, marching bands, different things. He does it in the Concord Sonata, but he does it less than in other pieces.
The purpose of the Concord Sonata was to represent Ives' vision of the free-thinking spirits of the great American transcendentalist writers, that would be Emerson, Hawthorn, Thoreau, and the Alcotts, and the world that they inhabited in Concord, Massachusetts.
This piece is one of the most finger breaking, phenomenal piano pieces of the 20th century. It is epic. It's a tremendous piece for piano as people have well recognized, but the scope is beyond the piano. It's colossal, really amazing. Ives undertook himself to orchestrate that piece but never completed it, although he took some of it in the orchestral setting in the 4th symphony and in other pieces.
It fell to Henry Brant. Henry Brant was an avant-garde composer, a very unusual composer who very much was concerned with large instrumental forces. He was very concerned with the spatial aspects of music. Not only what the sound is, but where it appears to come from. He actually knew Ives. He passed out very recently in his late nineties, so he had a connection back to Ives himself. Henry Brant was a great orchestrator. He made his living by orchestrating shows and movies and various things. In a way, he was like a colleague of his who was a also fan of Charles Ives, Bernard Herrman, who wrote all the great Hitchcock movie scores.
There were the kind of guys who were on Ives' side, along with Lou Harrison, John Kirkpatrick. In the days Ives was considered a kind of lunatic, these were the major guys who said: "No, he's not a lunatic! He's a major inventive genius, and what can we do to make his work better known." What Brant did, for over fifty years, was to orchestrate this Concord sonata. Only recently he completed it, but the piece is still performed very little.
In my experience, this is the most spectacular transcription ever done. The scope of it is amazing. What Brant had to do in the first place, he had to put bar lines into the piece. Much of the the Concord Sonata has no bar lines. Ives tried to write this in a way, like Emerson, to encourage the greatest freedom of expression. He did not want to contain the piece within bar lines. It's just pages and pages of these free notes flowing across the page. What Brant had to do was create bar lines, so it would possible for 100 musicians to play it. And he's done it very brilliantly.
Also, he's such a master orchestrator, the orchestral situation he has developed, the piece seems freer and clearer than any piece of Ives has written.
Brant said he wanted to make it as practical as Tchaikovsky.
Way more than that! The term I want to use is, like, technical. The orchestration does have a certain sound, it's like an avant-garde movie score in some ways. It's an incredible expansion, the sound stretches, the sound makes such a big horizon. I'm so enthusiastic about doing this piece with our incredible orchestra in the [Davies Hall] space. It's a very new insight into one of Ives' two most important pieces. There are not many orchestras that can undertake something as difficult, and as rewarding as this.
Did you know Henri Brant personally?
Henry Brant was here, we commissioned a piece from him, called Ice Field, that was played by the San Francisco Symphony with Henry Brant playing the organ part. It was a very big success and it won the Pulitzer prize!
Mahler Cycle huge success, a great accomplishment. What would you describe as your best accomplishment as music director and why?
That's for other people to say than for me. Working on this music with the orchestra has been a central part in forming our relationship and making everyone comfortable with the risks we take. We play with a great deal of color and shape, that's what we're noted for, and working on this music helped create much of that.
You just turned 65, an age for which most people look at as retirement age. You show no sign of slowing down, what are your intentions for the future?
It's going to be very active, I'm getting back to playing the piano more again. Also, we're going to embark on all the projects that concern the Centenaries activities, the 100th birthday of the Symphony, I'm going to be opening a new building for my school in Florida, called the New World Symphony, we're building music meeting house a very new performance space designed by Frank Gehry. It incorporates many many ideas about new situations in the performing arts.
You said you'd play the piano more again, yet the reviewers from your performance last week as a pianist said you were more a conductor than a pianist. Are you trying to switch that pendulum?
If I did what I do, if I made plans in my life based on reviews, I wouldn't do anything. I have a vision for what I want to do with my piano playing. Fortunately, I have already three or four colleagues who want to play with me: Emanuel Axe, Yo-Yo Ma, Tom Hampson and Renee Fleming. So I think I'm doing ok.
Will you play with them with the SF Symphony?
You're asking me too much. But I guarantee that I won't stop my efforts to keep audiences in San Francisco challenged, entertained and satisfied.