Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. Michael Tilson Thomas, the composer and conductor who presided over the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra for 25 years, died last week at age 81. He had battled brain cancer since 2022. The musical and social impact of Tilson Thomas ranged far beyond the podium.
As an educator, he co-founded the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, a place for musicians to launch their careers. He composed and performed original works. As a TV host on PBS, he presented a 10-part multi-year series about classical music, as well as a two-hour special about his own grandparents.
And by being open in San Francisco about his half-century private relationship with his life partner, Tilson Thomas was an early and influential figure in the gay rights movement. Michael Tilson Thomas was born in Los Angeles in 1944 into an artistic family that stretched back for generations.
His paternal grandparents, Boris and Bessie Tomaszewski, as both stars and organizers of a national road company, helped establish the American Yiddish theater. In 2012, Tilson Thomas celebrated them in a Great Performances TV special called The Tomaszewskis. Their son Tony, Tilson Thomas' father, also was in show business.
He was a producer of the classic Orson Welles radio show Mercury Theater on the Air, and later, for television, wrote for such programs as Death Valley Days and Lassie. Michael Tilson Thomas gravitated to television as well.
In 2000, five years after joining the San Francisco Symphony and establishing himself as a world-class conductor, he was interviewed by Morley Safer on 60 Minutes, who asked him how he saw his job as a conductor.
In my mind, the conductor is much more like a director in the theater. It's very clear to me, perhaps because of my family, that the musicians are the ones who are actually doing the playing. And I am there to help them
focus and clarify what they need to do so that they appear to their very best and feel that freedom and confidence to be their very best because in the process of playing these thousands of notes and there are thousands of notes they're playing in every performance and They need sometimes help to say, ah, here, make more space for your colleagues over here. Be more aggressive about this.
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Chapter 2: What impact did Michael Tilson Thomas have on classical music?
Don't be afraid to take the risk to be even quieter here. The way a director would help the actors to clarify their ensemble.
Four years later, in 2004, Michael Tilson Thomas had enough visibility and clout to mount his own music appreciation TV series on PBS, as Leonard Bernstein had done before him. Tilson Thomas' series was called Keeping Score. It presented ten installments over seven years, introducing classical works to TV viewers in a very personal and informal manner.
Music
This is Beethoven's Third Symphony, the one he called Eroica. It took Beethoven three years to write this piece. It has taken me nearly 30 years to get my head around it and understand it, feel comfortable with it. This score is a messy record of all the questions I asked and the answers I searched for. And time and again along this journey, I asked myself, why is this taking me so long?
Well, part of it, of course, is it's by Beethoven. And anytime you do a piece by Beethoven, you feel this big weight on your shoulders. The guy is so great and so famous. He's not just a composer. He's a brand. He's an icon. He's an industry. How famous is Beethoven?
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Chapter 3: How did Michael Tilson Thomas contribute to music education?
Even Chuck Berry knows who he is. Roll over, Beethoven, tell Sikorsky the news. Which is pretty good for a guy who lived 200 years ago and never even had a gold record.
After discussing the history and impact of each piece, he then conducted his San Francisco Orchestra in a passionate performance, as here with Eroica.
Eroica Thank you.
Michael Tilson Thomas also was a composer. Perhaps his most meaningful composition was a combination orchestral piece and recitation called From the Diary of Anne Frank. He wrote it for Audrey Hepburn, who, like Anne Frank, was born in Holland in 1929. While Anne Frank was in hiding, young Hepburn was aiding the Dutch resistance. She survived. Anne Frank did not, but her diary did.
Hepburn went to Hollywood, became a star, and was asked to play Anne Frank in a 1959 movie. She declined, feeling it was all too close and personal. But when Michael Tilson Thomas wrote a piece with Audrey Hepburn as his muse, she agreed to read Anne Frank's words as the orchestra played Tilson Thomas's stirring music.
In this passage, from a 1990 performance in Oslo conducted by Lucas Voss, you can hear the musical equivalence of Nazi Jackboots and later of Hope. And, of course, you also can hear Audrey Hepburn reading the words of young Anne Frank.
It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery and death. I see the world being turned into a wilderness. I hear the ever approaching thunder which will destroy us too. I can feel the suffering of millions.
And yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think it will all come right. That this cruelty will end and that peace and tranquility will return again.
Today on Fresh Air, we're going to remember Michael Tilson Thomas by listening back to two of his conversations with Terry Gross. The first took part in 1995, the year he took the job as conductor in San Francisco.
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Chapter 4: What role did family heritage play in Tilson Thomas's career?
I mean, also Copland. But I very early perceived that there were some people in the music business who had been playing music for their whole lives, who seemed to be ennobled and transfigured nearly by the process of making music, and others who seemed to be very unhappy and embittered by the experience of making music. And
So I was trying from the very beginning to understand what was the difference between these people. Where did the choice lie between having a life in music that made you very, very happy or one that made you very frustrated?
What were you able to figure out?
Well, I decided way back then that it was important for musicians to kind of take a musical Hippocratic oath before they went into the profession.
And what is the oath?
That you have to discover that it's just necessary for you to make music. I mean, to be a musician, you have to love music as much as eating or sleeping or dreaming or all those other ings. And you can't be sure when you... enter the profession of music where it may take you. It is uncertain. It depends a lot on being very well prepared and being in the right place at the right time.
But I remember a moment when I was around 18 or 19 and I was walking on the USC campus where I was going to school. And I thought to myself, well, I know that I'm good enough. I know I'm good enough. I could be... a university musician, and there are wonderful things happening at this music school of great quality and expression.
And if I could do this, as long as I can make music, I'll be very happy. And if it turns out that I can make music in some larger arena, well, we'll see about that. But I know that it's music itself, which is this process, this dialogue with something in my spirit that I must pursue. And then I knew I was... Going into music with no other agenda. It was just the music itself that mattered.
And it was those people for whom music truly mattered who were the ones that had wonderful lives as musicians.
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Chapter 5: How did Michael Tilson Thomas view the conductor's role?
When I was studying pieces, I had the opportunity to, you know, to calm up and ask questions. And In the best kind of rabbinic style, almost always when I asked him a question, he would ask me a question back. And by this kind of dialogue of questions, he would help me to really find my own way of doing the music. And that was, of course, terrific.
And I guess my conducting style has become a lot... freer, it's a lot more economical now maybe than it was 10 years ago, but these things change. I can only say that now it feels to me in the repertoire that's really mine that as if I'm making the music happen in space, as if I'm touching the notes and actually molding them and shaping them in some kind of plastic way within time itself.
You were on the road with James Brown once, right?
Well, I was with him for a couple of days. I met him in Boston. He was doing a show in a small jazz club. And I told him I was a great admirer of his. And he said, well, come on the road. See how we do it. Because I asked him how he got the band to be so tight. This was the time when he was doing Sex Machine was his big hit.
And I spent three or four days with him in Atlanta and Augusta and in Washington, D.C., watching from backstage just what he did. And it was a great thrill.
So did you learn anything you could apply?
Absolutely, because what I realized that he was focused on the exact duration of the perceivable present. In every particular piece, the stroke of the beat had a certain length. He wanted the trap drummer to be out in front and the hand drummer to be in the back and the
bass player to be right in the center, and he had an exact idea of how wide in time that stroke of the chunk-chunk would be, and he used it, and it was something very sophisticated, just the kind of thing that composers like Igor Stravinsky thought about a great deal.
So did it change the way you conducted at all, or the way you organized your beat?
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Chapter 6: What was the significance of the PBS series 'Keeping Score'?
And so they couldn't read the regular newspapers. A lot of the English language theater would not have literal meaning to them because they wouldn't understand the language. So the Yiddish stage, I mean, that was a really important, particularly in New York, a really important... place for gathering and for doing anything cultural.
Well, absolutely. Of course, there were very many Yiddish newspapers in New York and Philadelphia and Chicago and all these major cities at that time. But for the audience to go to the theater to experience a show, especially a show which was very often, in my grandfather's case, a kind of spectacle that
gave them a sense of the importance, the sheer scale of what was achievable by an immigrant in the United States. It inspired them. Old ladies used to come up to me on the street and said, we were kids, we had nothing, but once a week or once a month we went to the theater and we saw the red velvet curtains with the name Tomaszewski and large gold letters.
And we thought, if that's possible for him to do, then it's possible for us to do.
Conductor, composer, and pianist Michael Tilson Thomas, talking with Terry Gross in 2012. He died last week at the age of 81. We'll hear more of this interview after a break. And John Powers reviews the new Devil Wears Prada movie. I'm David Bianculli, and this is Fresh Air.
The name Tomaszewski is such a famous name in the world of theater and in the world of Yiddish theater. I grew up knowing that name. I knew that Tomaszewskis were famous performers on the Yiddish stage, but that's about all I knew. Your last name is Thomas, which is an abbreviated version of Tomaszewski. How did Tomaszewski become Thomas?
It really started with my father, who was trying to make his own way in life in the theater. And he simply was unable to do that. Everywhere that he went, he would mention his last name, and right away it was, oh, you're Boris Tabashevsky's son, and therefore he didn't want that. He just wanted to be able to find his own way in life and in the theater.
So he was the one who changed his name initially to Ted Thomas. And quite frankly... He also wanted to escape from that whole crazed celebrity situation, which my grandparents inspired. And I think he also wanted to protect me from that because there were questions. Crazed fans is the only way of describing it.
There were stalker kinds of people who were pursuing my grandparents and their children with the same kind of ardor that we're accustomed to thinking of crazy paparazzi or fans pursuing stars today.
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Chapter 7: What was Michael Tilson Thomas's most meaningful composition?
You've got to keep the contour of it all the way going through. Same thing in music.
That's really great. Michael Tilson Thomas, thank you. It's been great.
As always, thank you. Michael Tilson Thomas speaking to Terry Gross in 2012. The longtime conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, who conducted more than 120 classical music recordings with major orchestras, died last week at age 81. Here's a sample of one of those recordings from very early in his career.
In 1976, Michael Tilson Thomas conducted the Columbia Jazz Band in a recording of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. Tilson Thomas relied on the original orchestrations when the piece first was performed in 1924 and on Gershwin's 1925 piano roll recording to present an authentic recreation of the work, a version that was both historically significant and widely praised.
Music ¶¶ Thank you.
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Chapter 8: How did Audrey Hepburn influence Tilson Thomas's work?
Thank you.
Coming up, critic-at-large John Powers reviews The Devil Wears Prada 2. This is Fresh Air. The Devil Wears Prada 2, which opens wide today, is a sequel to the 2006 hit about an idealistic young journalist, played by Anne Hathaway, who becomes the assistant to a scary dictatorial fashion magazine editor, played by Meryl Streep.
Both reprise their roles in this new film, as do Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci. It finds the magazine world in a vastly different place than it was 20 years ago. Our critic-at-large, John Powers, says the film, if not quite as much a lark as the original, is still good fun and has more to say.
When The Devil Wears Prada hit theaters in 2006, I was the film critic at Vogue, the model for Runway, the fashion magazine in the story. The inspiration for Meryl Streep's icy editor, Miranda Priestley, was my own boss, the legendary Anna Wintour. I didn't do a review because, no matter what I said about the movie, which I found slight but entertaining, people wouldn't have trusted it.
Now comes the long-awaited The Devil Wears Prada 2. And I'm free to say that David Frankel's film should delight fans of the first one. Cleverly written by Aline Brasch McKenna, this fizzy sequel boasts the same expert cast, all as good as you'd hope. Not to mention the same ravishing outfits and sumptuous hotel suites.
But as the action moves glossily from Manhattan high-rises to New England mansions to Lady Gaga singing in a Milanese museum, it has more on its mind than the original. The story is set 20 years later in the present day. Anne Hathaway is back as smiley, wholesome Andy Sachs, who's risen from being Miranda's beleaguered assistant to become a prize-winning reporter of hard news stories.
Then she gets laid off from her paper. Luckily, there's been a scandal over a foolish article in Runway. And in a damage control move, the owner hires the respected Andy to be the magazine's features editor. She's back where she started. Only this time, she winds up trying to save the publication she once thought her personal hell. Like any good sequel, the movie feels like a reunion.
The elegant silver-haired Miranda, Streep is impeccable, greets Andy's arrival with trademark imperiousness. Andy's mentor, the art director Nigel Kipling, is still there too, to dress her and guide her, and in Stanley Tucci's lovely performance, be quietly touching.
Emily Blunt's scheming character, Emily Charlton, who was once Andy's sharp-elbowed rival, has left runway for a big job at Dior's New York outpost and is romantically involved with Benji Barnes, that's Justin Theroux, a dorky, smug Jeff Bezos figure with a wise, philanthropic ex-wife played by Lucy Liu. Here, early on, Andy, Nigel, and Miranda go to the Dior offices.
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