GRACE: The Music of Michael Tilson Thomas. Measha Brueggergosman-Lee, Renée Fleming, Audra McDonald, Lisa Vroman (sopranos), Sasha Cooke (mezzo-soprano), Isabel Leonard (narrator), Thomas Hampson (baritone), Ryan McKinny (bass-baritone), Jean-Yves Thibaudet, John Wilson (pianos), Paula Robison (flute), Paul Posey (baritone sax), Ian Bousfield (trombone), San Francisco Symphony, New World Symphony, Bay Brass, Michael Tilson Thomas, Edwin Outwater (conductors). Pentatone PTC 5187 355 (four CDs). Total Time: 298:02
DIGITAL REVIEW — When Leonard Bernstein died in 1990, the general line was that his protegé, Michael Tilson Thomas, would inherit his mantle as the multiple-threat American musician. As far as being a world-class conductor, pianist, educator, television personality, musical eclectic, prolific recording artist, and thinker, MTT was already there — famous, respected, and even revered.
The only activity that seemed to be missing from the Bernstein model at the time was that of composer. It turns out that Tilson Thomas was doing that, too, from his childhood in North Hollywood, Calif., onward but kept his music almost completely under wraps for decades. A lot of it just existed in sketches and scraps in notebooks, written in his spare time as he pursued his conducting career. It was the pianist Ilana Vered who first told me many years ago that Tilson Thomas also composed music and that she had heard him play some of it, yet he had never mentioned composing to me in a series of interviews from those days.
By the 1990s, after MTT’s 70th birthday song for Bernstein, “Grace,” and his symphonic melodrama From The Diary of Anne Frank were performed and acclaimed, his music started emerging in dribs and drabs, heard mainly in concert in his San Francisco and Miami Beach bases and more recently in his original hometown, Los Angeles.
Now, with his 80th birthday looming in December, MTT’s compositions are finally being unleashed upon the world at large. GRACE: The Music of Michael Tilson Thomas, contains almost all of his output in a well-packed, almost five-hour-long album. It takes the form of a handsome, richly illustrated book containing pockets for the four discs, MTT’s own comments about each piece, essays by John Adams and Larry Rothe, a fascinating photo timeline of his unique career, and even a dangling bookmark. It’s not cheap, but all proceeds from the set will be donated to brain cancer research at the University of California, San Francisco Brain Tumor Center, where MTT is receiving treatment for his ongoing battle with glioblastoma.
There are 18 compositions in the set, which draws upon previously released recordings on loan from a quartet of labels, first releases of live recordings from the archives of the San Francisco and New World Symphonies, and some new ones recorded recently at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where Tilson Thomas was named Distinguished Professor of Music in April. It so happens that the SFCM now owns the Pentatone label, making this project a convenient in-house deal. Five of the 18 works have been released on recordings already, which if you add up the timings means that the set consists of half newly released and half reissued music. The sound quality throughout the set is excellent, even the archive material, and that can be attributed to the presence of producer Jack Vad, who has done sterling work with the sound on MTT’s SFS Media recordings.
The sequencing is kind of a mish-mosh, not in chronological or format order but rather an oddball parade where, for example, an extensive orchestral song cycle (Meditations on Rilke) is followed by a short piece for solo trombone (Snappy Patter), or a concerto for baritone saxophone (Urban Legend) lies between a brief setting of an Emily Dickinson poem (“I’m Nobody! Who Are You?”) and an uproariously funny parody of country-western music saluting a departing SFS president (Symphony Cowgirl). In a way, that’s appropriate: It suggests the mercurial mind of MTT, with whom I’ve had epic conversations one-on-one that darted all over the place.
A mercurial set it is, as a whole and often within the context of a single piece. It leads off with Agnegram, a jolly, circus-like orchestral jaunt, full of in-jokes, slapstick, bits of the 1812 Overture and West Side Story; indeed Lenny might have recognized himself in its fun-house frolics. On the other hand, Street Song, already the best-known of MTT’s compositions, is a mostly austere set of meditations for a brass ensemble. Or how about Island Music, which, though a bit long for its material, contains 30 minutes of sometimes percolating, gamelan-inspired writing for a pair of marimbas and other percussion instruments.
Tilson Thomas turns out to be a natural for writing beautiful American pop songs, both music and lyrics. Mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, a frequent MTT muse, sings wonderfully in “Not Everyone Thinks I’m Beautiful,” which luxuriously places itself halfway between Broadway and art song. One can easily imagine jazz’s Sarah (Sassy) Vaughan, who collaborated with MTT frequently, singing the sultry “Sentimental Again,” but it also fits the lighter, flexible timbre of Audra McDonald comfortably.
There are five major song cycles here, three of which were rescued from the archives. I hear hints of Respighi’s Fountains of Rome in From The Diary of Anne Frank, in which Isabel Leonard shows as much expressive talent as a narrator as she does as a singer. The score gradually descends from innocence into the depths of despair and back.
The wildest song cycle, a setting of Carl Sandburg’s poem “Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind,” whose roots date back to 1976 when MTT was improvising a piano version, was finally completed in 2015-16. A moody, quiet opening for chamber orchestra suddenly gives way to the ching-ching of a cash register and a burst of contrapuntal funk from a nine-piece “bar band.” Again, the vocal lines entrusted to Measha Brueggergosman-Lee could have been perfectly suited for Sassy, and a repetitive funk vamp on the “rats and lizards” line is straight out of another member of MTT’s gallery of heroes, James Brown, circa “The Payback.”
There are whimsical pieces here: Symphony Cowgirl is one, another is an orchestral thing called Lope. It’s not the first piece to depict a lope with man’s best friend — see George Gershwin’s “Walking the Dog” (aka Promenade) — but this one is far quirkier, with the same basic rhythm carrying it through, almost in a minimalist way. MTT’s description of a typical walk with one of his dogs in the book is a gem — and, take my word for it, it rings of truth.
By the time we reach Meditations on Rilke (2019) on the fourth disc, a warming, mellowing process informed by constant conducting and study of the Western classical music canon has taken hold, and the touch of Mahler can be felt explicitly in an orchestral outburst reminiscent of one in the Symphony No. 3 toward the close of “The Song the Drunkard Sings.” This song cycle sounds more mature and more inward than its predecessors, and both Cooke and bass-baritone Ryan McKinny are in top form. But then, what are we to make of its nostalgic honky-tonk jazz piano intro (inspired by a story from MTT’s father) that launches the piece, only to vanish entirely from the rest of it? That’s MTT, still thinking outside the box.
It’s too soon to know whether these remarkably varied, resourcefully orchestrated, sometimes thorny, more often lovely pieces will stand the test of time. I do not hear a distinctive MTT sound per se here (as I do in Bernstein’s music), but that may not be the point; rather, it is his lively, ever-curious, ever-open-minded personality that puts its own unique stamp on these pieces. And there is no doubt that this album will be the definitive collection of them.
