Playing dangerously

The reaction was immediate and specific when I told my Palo Alto resident brother that I was coming over to his part of the world to interview Michael Tilson Thomas. "Ah," he said, "Poster Boy!" Tilson Thomas's appointment as the 11th music director of the San Francisco Symphony in 1995 caused a stir in more than musical circles. He was quite a change from the solidly conservative Herbert Blomstedt. Flamboyance would be more his line than heavy earnestness, and the level of his commitment to his new post was evidenced when he sold up property elsewhere to settle in San Francisco. So the San Francisco Symphony heralded his arrival with a billboard campaign which made sure that none of the city's citizens would underestimate the importance of the event.

Tilson Thomas (or MTT, as he has been branded) has had a distinguished career. He was born into an artistic family in Los Angeles in 1944. His grandparents, Boris and Bessie Thomaschefsky, were founding members of the Yiddish Theatre in America. His parents both worked in films and television. While still a student, he worked with leading composers (Stravinsky, Boulez, Copland) and performers (Heifetz, Piatigorsky). At the age of 24, after winning the Koussevitzky Prize at Tanglewood, he became assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and made his New York debut with them just 10 days later in a mid-concert substitution for William Steinberg. Before coming to San Francisco, he had been principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra.

When I arrived on the west coast, he was in the middle of a two-and-a-half week Mahler celebration, performances of the Fifth, Ninth and Tenth symphonies already behind him, and four performances of the Eighth still to come. In rehearsal he is totally energised. If he had two voices to talk to two different sections of the orchestra at once, he would. He doesn't want to waste a second, although he's well enough aware of the draining demands he's making to leaven his remarks with lively wit and humour. At the session I get to, he's doing what you might call tidying up work, running through a list of details left unresolved at a previous rehearsal.

He makes explicit pleas in colourful language, asking for playing "with abandon", "wild and desperate", "romantic", at one point asking: "Could the A sharp be more extravagantly vibrated?", at another suggesting a note should be "a heart-piercing boatswain's whistle". He sings with a hoarse conductor's voice (and sometimes in grotesque falsetto) when other methods fail, and, when he does, the extra charge in the playing is always evident.

When we meet for the interview, he is quiet and reserved, almost detached. I ask him first about how he found the orchestra when he arrived as its new music director and what he wanted to change. "I had known this orchestra for some 20 years, I'd been guest conducting it. Certainly, the orchestra had become a precision and virtuoso ensemble. What I wanted to do was to work with all that technique to get results which were a bit more colouristic, expressive, engaging, maybe dangerous, than perhaps had been done before."

He also wanted "to balance the repertoire very well between new music, old music, and music that represented a very wide range of cultures". There was to be "a very strong emphasis on American music, but also on French, Spanish, Russian, German, the whole picture . . . to really make the orchestra a true repertory company. I really think it's very important that orchestras and ensembles in classical music do as theatre companies are more drawn to do - represent the full range of the repertoire."

Before his arrival the emphasis had been Germanic. In MTT's first year, there was an American piece on every programme. The current season includes works by 17 living composers. And he has stretched the orchestra by reaching into some unusual areas such as French baroque, now widely treated as the exclusive domain of period-instruments bands. "I wanted to develop the audiences' sense of confidence in us, so that they could see in the programme pieces that they didn't know, and that they could have confidence that those pieces would be exciting and interesting for them to hear. That's the road we decided to pursue."

We turn to the changing role of the conductor and the suggestion that the best orchestras are now so good that there's not really that much for conductors to do any more. Hardly surprisingly, he disagrees. "There's still an enormous amount for the conductor to do. Perhaps what he does has slightly changed in focus, though I don't really believe at the highest level that those things really do change. The whole point is that what an audience finds attractive is a performance which has a great deal of personality and a very specific kind of contour and range of expression. That's what's attractive to people in hearing great singers or great violinists or great pianists.

"So, it seems to me that the future of orchestral music is not just anymore that the orchestra plays together and in tune. That's expected with the level of technique we have. But there still is always that frontier of trying to work with an ensemble of 80 or 100 people and get them to really play with abandon - with both abandon and precision. I'm always very fond of saying there's a very big difference between hearing 16 violins play exactly together - that can be drilled - but to get 16 violins to play as if they are one, that's a whole other kind of level. It suggests a kind of subtlety and range of expression which I think is vital for orchestras to continue to be interesting to the public."

He elaborates his concern about audiences. "We must continue to build the bridge between the audience and the repertory of classical music, both the traditional repertory and the evolving repertory, because that obviously is the future for this art, and to recover and re-invent a future for it in which the live performance is an exciting and viable part. Yes, it is true, we can listen to records of lots of these pieces, but that's not really the same experience as a committed, live performance. It's really important for musicians to re-dedicate themselves and recover this kind of excitement which can exist in a live performance and which an audience really can feel."

And, keeping to the spirit in which he's talking, his first recording with the San Francisco Symphony, suitably emblazoned with MTT in large, red lettering, was of a live recording of scenes from Prokofiev's ballet, Romeo and Juliet.

Recordings, he feels, are a mixed blessing. Yes, they do bring music to a vast public, but "they're also dangerous in that people, hearing the same performance over and over again, can in time become so used to that particular performance that they can mistake it for the piece. They can become a little bit like very young children, who, when you tell them a bedtime story, say Goldilocks and the Three Bears, they want you to tell it to them exactly that way. If you change the order of anything, or if you emphasise the words differently, or, God forbid, if you should leave out the middle bear, they are immediately very upset. They have this emotional interest in it being exactly the one way. "In the case of these big masterpieces, what's exciting is to have them show different sides of their natures on different occasions. Again, perhaps because my family comes from a theatrical background, I think of this much more from that point of view. No one would ever suggest that Shakespeare or Euripides or Chekhov should be straitjacketed within one particular kind of style, no matter how historically accurate or how fascinatingly avant-garde or whatever it might be. That's just one of a series of perspectives. It's one of the vitalities of the theatre that it maintains that fluidity. To some degree, I think classical music must go more in that direction."

Michael Tilson Thomas conducts the San Francisco Symphony at the National Concert Hall tonight in Charles Ives's Three Places in New England, Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto (soloist Gil Shaham), and Prokofiev's Sixth Symphony. There is an open rehearsal this morning at 10 a.m. Details from 01- 4751666.