Michael Tilson Thomas has just completed a 25-year stint as Music Director of San Francisco Symphony (SFS) of which the orchestra achieved remarkable artistic results under his leadership. At 75 years old he remains a dynamic conductor and composer. Let’s not forget his Poems of Emily Dickinson which premiered in 2002 with Renee Fleming and his formidable pianistic skills that can be heard in the piano-duo version of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring which he recorded with Ralph Grierson in 1969. SFS is offering MTT25: An Online Tribute through June 28 on their YouTube Channel.
Thomas has always championed the works of American composers such as Ives, Copland, Harrison, Bernstein, Adams, Feldman, Ruggles and Reich in addition to traditional repertoire where he and SFS recorded the complete Mahler symphonies. His latest release features two of his own compositions: From the Diary of Anne Frank that New World Symphony premiered in 1990 (Thomas co-founded and is Artistic Director of the orchestra) and Meditations on Rilke which received a debut performance with SFS in January of this year.
These compositions are brilliantly played and conceived as atmospheric tone poems, especially From the Diary of Anne Frank which elicits a lush soundscape of orchestration that may hint at Mahler’s The Boy’s Magic Horn, Songs of a Wayfarer, Bernstein’s West Side Story – but is quintessentially Thomas for its harmonic elegance and structural complexity.
Thomas offers this description of From the Diary of Anne Frank. “The work is a melodrama in the form of symphonic variations. I now realize that so much of this work is a reflection not only of Anne Frank but of Audrey Hepburn.” The beloved actress and humanitarian contacted Thomas in her role as ambassador to UNICEF and asked him to write a piece based on writings of Frank, which have been published in The Diary of a Young Girl. This work has since been performed worldwide.
The poignant story of 13 year-old Frank serves as inspiration and a wake-up call about injustice which in her case was based in Amsterdam where she and family hid from the Nazis in an annex of her father’s warehouse, were snitched on and sent to concentration camps where all but her father perished. In putting together the four part work a collaboration between Thomas and Hepburn seemed magical from the inception for its clever choice of orchestration and text.
An integral element of the design is a narration of Frank’s words that include imaginary conversations with Kitty her make believe friend. Hepburn was narrator in its debut but for this recording mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard delivers the spoke verse with a sense of smooth-toned operatic inflection. Well-chosen sentences are read to musical accompaniment which creates a potent soundworld of timbres and harmonic undercurrents that convey Frank’s impressions about topics such as war, persecution of European Jewry, nature and what it’s like to live in hiding. The instrumentation provides motives from the Jewish mourning prayer, especially prevalent in the opening, all tied together with a hefty mixture of tonal effects that include harp, percussion, glockenspiel, chimes, xylophone and bongos. Brass and wind interludes are delivered with crystalline intonation and swirling melodic patterns are beautifully crafted by the honey-dipped string and wind sections.
Frank wrote in the diary, “I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart.” This seems to be the overriding raison d’ etre of Thomas’ work and his revelatory approach to just about everything including Meditations on Rilke with mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke and bass-baritone Ryan McKinny. If From the Diary of Anne Frank was inspired by Thomas’ partnership with Hepburn this work evokes his father’s musical background, especially a piano gig in Arizona where he was asked to play tunes like Bear Fat Fling.
Thomas says, “These Six Rilke Songs perhaps Meditations on Rilke Texts are reflections of the many moods the poems suggest.” Bohemian-Czech lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s depth of sentiment is portrayed in a kaleidoscope of nuances that produce expressive and austere qualities. For example - Herbsttag (Autumn Day) opens with a saloon-tinged piano solo and morphs into an exotic palette of textures that McKinny delivers with sotto voce and soaring resonance. He also duos with Cooke in Imaginaerer Lebenslauf (Imaginary Biography) which sparkles with rhythmic punch and a mysterious Second Viennese School hue.
And then there is Immer wieder (Again and Again) which Thomas says “is like a Schubert cowboy song.” The work should be considered a stand-alone jewel of this cycle for stylistic originality in its use of brass infused instrumentation which is enhanced by the lilting, supple purity of Cooke’s tone. Thomas’ personalized writing combined with very fine playing from SFS make this a compelling release. It is available on the SFS Media label in various formats from June 26.