United States Various: Sasha Cooke, Frederica von Stade (mezzo-sopranos), Jessica Voss (vocalist), Ben Jones (tenor), San Francisco Symphony Chorus (director: Jenny Wong), San Francisco Symphony / Michael Tilson Thomas, Teddy Abrams, Edwin Outwater (conductors). Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, 26.4.2025. (HS)
Everyone present knew that, inevitably, this would be Michael Tilson Thomas’s last bow after making music with the San Francisco Symphony in a 51-year association that included 25 years as Music Director, the past five as Music Director Laureate. He said so in February, when he announced the return of the glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer diagnosed in 2021, and revealed that this 80th birthday celebration would be his farewell to performing.
The concert, produced by the conductor’s husband, Joshua Robison, featured a program that met the occasion square-on. Every element connected with this musician’s life story, nostalgic in some ways but always with a droll take on it. All four singing soloists have long histories with him, and the music selected struck an emotional balance that was more wistful recollection than funereal dirge.
The audience arrived to find bandanas draping the seats which read: ‘There are two key times in an artist’s life. The first is inventing yourself. The second, the harder part, is going the distance. – Michael Tilson Thomas’
MTT conducted the orchestral pieces that framed the program – Britten’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell and Respighi’s Roman Festivals. He needed help from Joshua Robison to get up on and off the platform. Longtime associates Teddy Abrams and Edwin Outwater helped by turning pages when MTT had the baton, and they conducted the rest of the program with their mentor in an armchair nearby. It looked like he was having a great time too.
Britten’s Variations, perhaps better known as the music for the composer’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, celebrated MTT’s connection with the musicians of this ensemble: the piece features every section and solos for every principal. The colorful sonorities of the music highlighted MTT’s ability to make those musical hues into a rainbow of diversity, and he conducted it, managing his usual control of details and rhythmic precision, without using the stool provided for him.
Abrams, mentored by MTT as a conducting fellow at the New World Symphony and music director of the Louisville Orchestra since 2014, took over the podium to lead the overture to Khantshe in Amerike, a 1915 Yiddish theater musical comedy that starred MTT’s mother, Bessie Thomashefsky. Its bouncy dances brought smiles from the birthday boy as he listened from an armchair on the stage.
Beginning with Abrams, each conductor and singer picked up a microphone to offer a reminiscence that tied themselves and, often, the work to the celebrant. None of them were maudlin. They all homed in on something specific that they had shared, usually with amusement, and each revealed an aspect that may not have been obvious to the audience.
Mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, who has often sung in Davies Hall with this orchestra and conductor, offered the first of several songs composed by MTT – ‘Immer wieder’, from Meditations on Rilke – noting that the composer thought of it as Schubert by way of cowboy songs. She delayed her entrance until the long orchestral introduction was almost over, one of many theatrical touches that added to the performances. The song’s text plays on the wistfulness of a permanent friendship.
Next came a duet with Cooke and Frederica von Stade, another world-class mezzo with an even longer connection that dates from the 1970s. Like MTT, she is a San Francisco resident. Both singers performed ‘Not Everyone Thinks That I’m Beautiful’ (written in 1985), a wry expression of self-deprecation that includes the line ‘all I have is leftover dreams that are far out of fashion’. Von Stade used her patented ability to shape a song to make Debussy’s ‘La flûte de Pan’ a jewel – especially in the line, ‘We have nothing to say to each other, we are so close to each other’.
Lyric tenor Ben Jones, who starred in the orchestra’s brilliant, semi-staged Candide in 2018, brought his bright voice to two Tilson Thomas songs. The first, ‘Drift Off to Sleep’ (from 1982), described life as ‘carrying us along to judgment day, and along the way a lot of wiles and whimsy’. ‘Answered Prayers’, from 1974 in a new orchestration by Bruce Coughlin, turns repeatedly to the refrain ‘or it doesn’t mean nothin’ when pointing out how hard it can be to keep up in life.
Conductor Edwin Outwater, who launched his career in 2001 as resident conductor of the San Francisco Symphony under MTT, led a knockout performance of ‘Take Back Your Mink’ (from Loesser’s Guys and Dolls), sung by Broadway star Jessica Voss. She then recalled how she aced an audition before MTT for the role of Anita in the orchestra’s 2013 West Side Story (the live recording of which won a Grammy).
Voss ended the first half with a bittersweet traversal of ‘Sentimental Again’, a jazz-inflected ballad by MTT that was inspired by Sarah Vaughan (who made a CD of Gershwin songs with MTT). Voss was pitch-perfect in style and intent, and Larry Moore’s new arrangement supported it deftly. It contains the line, ‘Think you’re so clever, ’til all your best laid plans go awry, and then you realize, nothing’s forever’.
After an intermission, Cooke returned to sing ‘Grace’, written for Leonard Bernstein’s 70th birthday at Tanglewood, part of a marathon concert of music written for the occasion in 1988. It underlines the value of friends, including composers that musicians favor. Cooke found a soulful groove with pianist John Wilson. (They also perform the title track on a new 4-CD set, titled Grace, of 18 MTT compositions; sales benefit the UC San Francisco Brain Tumor Center.)
The Finale from Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms (sung in Hebrew), which the chorus handled with verve, ended with music of beauty and solace, an appropriate tone for the evening.
MTT picked up the baton for the program’s final work and drew dazzling playing in Respighi’s four-movement tone poem, Roman Festivals. Again, one reveled in this conductor’s forte for drama, rendering musical pictures in vivid colors.
Two encores topped things off. Outwater returned with all four singers for ‘Some Other Time’ from Bernstein’s On the Town (which MTT conducted in a 2016 semi-staged production here). It is a song about the ruefulness of not having enough time together, which certainly reflected the prevailing emotions of the evening: ‘Where has the time all gone to?/Haven’t done half the things I want to/Oh, well, we’ll catch up some other time’.
As a tidy little extra, Abrams conducted MTT’s arrangement of Arnold Perlmutter and Herman Wohl’s ‘Bar Mitzvah March’, which was part of The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater, an evening-long tribute to the music director’s parents. A big balloon drop of various-size floating spheres descended from the ceiling – blue, of course, MTT’s favorite color.
Harvey Steiman
Featured Image: Edwin Outwater and Joshua Robison applaud as Michael Tilson Thomas takes a final bow © Stefan Cohen
Britten – Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell
Rumshinky (arr. Thomas) – Overture to Khantshe in Amerike
Thomas –‘Immer wieder’ from Meditations on Rilke, ‘Not Everyone Thinks That I’m Beautiful’, ‘Drift off to Sleep’, ‘Answered Prayers’, ‘Sentimental Again’, ‘Grace’
Debussy – ‘La flûte de Pan’ from Chanson de Bilitis
Loesser – ‘Take Back Your Mink’ from Guys and Dolls
Bernstein – Finale from Chichester Psalms
Respighi – Roman Festivals
Encores:
Bernstein – ‘Some Other Time’ from On the Town
Perlmutter/Wohl (arr. Thomas) – ‘Bar Mitzvah March’ from The Thomashefskys