In the face of serious illness, the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas led two memorable programs at the L.A. Phil.
The trouble with doom-laden readings of the Ninth—for Bernstein, it presaged not only its composer’s death but also “the death of tonality . . . the death of music itself . . . the death of society, of our Faustian culture”—is that Mahler’s entire œuvre dwells on mortality. If he had died at any earlier stage, his music could have been said to foretell his demise just as clearly.
Yet he remained silent, acknowledging the crowd with a couple of bows and a friendly wave of the hand. His interpretation of Mahler’s valediction gave little sign of being weighed down by Bernsteinian baggage. It was, to be sure, quite slow, extending well past the ninety-minute mark; but Tilson Thomas always tends to take his time in Mahler, as is evident in his recorded cycle with the San Francisco Symphony, which he led from 1995 to 2020.
In the past three decades, I’ve seen Tilson Thomas in concert thirty or so times. He has led more than a few arresting performances of mainstream repertory, but his real legacy is in the exuberant diversity of his programming. I will never forget his raucous “American Festival,” in San Francisco in 1996, which included a wake-the-dead rendition of Lou Harrison’s Organ Concerto and an improvisation with members of the Grateful Dead.
Before tackling the Mahler, Tilson Thomas led the L.A. Phil in a much different program, one whose sensuous, buoyant energy brought back memories of his early years in San Francisco. Debussy served as the anchor, and no one alive conducts that composer better. The “Prelude to ‘The Afternoon of a Faun’ ” sounded as lucid and as vital as it did when Tilson Thomas recorded it with the Boston Symphony, back in 1971.
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