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Michael Tilson Thomas ?

Orchestra: Hi was wondering if anyone has played under him

From s smith
Posted March 23, 2005 at 05:29 AM

Hi! Was wondering if anyone has played under Michael Tilson Thomas? If so what are his rehearsals like? What kind of conductor is he?

From Alex Shiozaki
Posted on March 23, 2005 at 05:42 AM

If you've ever seen SF Symphony's "Keeping Score", he is exactly how he appears on that show. MTT is especially good at keeping music sounding fresh, rather than something you've heard over and over. A few weeks ago he listened to our orchestra play Schumann's Symphony No. 3, and he somehow managed to integrate Cuban music into his explanation of how to handle the tiny space between the end of a phrase and the beginning of the next. He also had the entire orchestra start yelling in the middle of Fountains of Rome somewhere in the third movement.

MTT also gives musicians under him a lot of leeway in interpreting the piece. Rather than giving you a box to operate in, he'd rather stand to the side to catch you if you fall. (I'm paraphrasing something I saw in Keeping Score.)

And this is totally unrelated to his conducting, but he is also an incredibly nice person.

From Gregory Lee
Posted on March 23, 2005 at 02:26 PM

As an audience member, watching him conduct was a little un-nerving because I simply couldn't follow him; and I didn't know how the orchestra managed to either. But when I played under him, it was a different story; I followed him no problem!

I've spoken to people who either love him or hate him; He's a very artsy type, but nice.

From Amy F.
Posted on March 23, 2005 at 05:04 PM

Yeah, I thought he was easy to follow when I played under him. And also, he comes up with great images to think about.

From John Barrett
Posted on March 29, 2005 at 02:58 AM

Michael Tilson Thomas has an interesting personal history. He is a grandson of Boris Thomaschevsky of the New York Second Avenue Yiddish Theater.
My grandfather David Meranski around 1910-15 ran a kosher restaurant at 25 Morgan St., Hartford, Connecticut, where noon meals were served to Jewish workmen, often with music provided. Thomaschevsky and members of his family sometimes performed there, and they invited my mother's sister Bertha to tour with him, but her parents thought she was too young - her grandson Jon Pollack is now Jazz director at http://wmbr.mit.edu in Boston.
One of Michael Tilson Thomas's recordings I like is of Darius Milhaud's chamber ballet on Harlem jazz themes "La Creation du Monde" which combines classical and jazz techniques and has several interesting parts for stringed instruments. This work has bitonal passages, with major and minor keys sounding concurrently, and it climaxes in a fugue. The instrument combination comes from jazz of the 1923 era, and the story of the birth of a baby is an African legend, it is said.
Michael Tilson Thomas is a versatile musician.

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