A Musical Pilgrim's Progress

By Jesse Birnbaum

From a huge caldron on the kitchen stove in a London flat wafts the comforting aroma of classic chicken soup, enough to feed a hungry orchestra. From a small upright piano in the living room wafts a bittersweet trickle of melody, enough to feed a hungry spirit. Michael Tilson Thomas, the 45-year-old principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, is cooking on both burners.

The soup, redolent of the shtetlach of Thomas' Jewish forebears, speaks for itself. The melody, from Anton Bruckner's sixth symphony, needs no elaboration either, but Thomas can no more resist parsing a composer's score than he can eclipse the twinkle in his brown eyes.

He is searching for the sound and phrasing of a passage that he wants to hear at a string rehearsal later today. With his right hand, its long thin fingers oddly flat at the tips and turned up like little spatulas, he plays the simple passage at heartbeat tempo. After a brief descent, the notes reverse direction, then fall, then rise slightly, then fall again and then, sighing, rise and fall into silence.

"What gets to me about that theme," Thomas tells his visitor, "is that it takes many directions but basically it's all one thing: falling." That reminds him of a Rilke poem, Autumn. "The leaves are falling," he says in singsong paraphrase, playing the passage again, "falling from on high as if from heaven's dying orchards. And each leaf falls with its own special gesture of denial, saying, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no."

Very nice. But invoking Rilke to demonstrate Bruckner is an impulse perhaps best confided to close friends, and certainly not to 100 or so impatient orchestra players. Besides, any conductor who was foolish enough to flog his musicians with images of leaves -- let alone leaves whimpering in denial -- would be hooted off the podium at the first fluttering whimp. Thomas learned a lesson on this point in his callow days during a rehearsal of Also Sprach Zarathustra with the Chicago Symphony. All his schoolboy nattering on the intellectual subtext of Strauss evoked only sly mockery from the musicians. At length, Thomas got the message.

"O.K.," he said. "Four bars happy, and then on the G-flat, six bars sad." The players came through.

The London Symphony fiddlers know happy and sad too, and they get really sad when they are subjected to boring lectures. Thomas' approach, therefore, will be straightforward. "I'll just say, 'Let the phrase fall gently downward, legato -- smoothly.' The violinists will know that the left hand must be the most intense and the right hand must be the lightest, exactly at the right moment. As they do it again and again, it will work into their own reflexes and their own minds and will become more natural, more beautiful. That's when it gets exciting -- when I suddenly hear them play it, and think, 'God, that's it! I could just give them a downbeat, and they could play all by themselves.' That's my true success."

That's what they all say, though everybody knows there isn't a pit bull alive that can drag a conductor off the stage. In any case, true success nowadays means more than the ability to produce a memorable performance. It means winning the directorship of a major ensemble, a substantial recording contract, the admiration of players, the acclaim of critics and audiences.

It also means consummate musicianship, and that is Thomas' unrivaled badge of excellence. Among American conductors, none is more talented or adventurous; among the world's best, he ranks in the top dozen. Almost unnoticed, he has established America's sole full-time training orchestra, the Florida-based New World Symphony, which prepares young musicians for professional jobs. The fine London Symphony Orchestra, a self-managed group, passed over several other ranking candidates (among them Lorin Maazel) when it unanimously elected Thomas as its maestro last year.

"He's a fantastic musician," says Lennie MacKenzie, chairman and the senior of the L.S.O.'s two concert-masters. "He's helped us a lot. He's a stickler on the box ((podium)), and he hears everything." On the box, Thomas, a reedy 6 ft., 158 lbs., looks like a sprightly, awkward Ichabod, arms flapping, legs skittering. His baton work is exceptional. His face reads like an animated directory of musical dynamics: he throws cues with his eyes; his expression darkens and brightens with such intensity that it seems riveted to the musicians' nerve endings. "He's got a good touch with the players," says L.S.O. managing director Clive Gillinson, "and an extraordinary imagination."

It is music that rules his imagination. Hiking and rock climbing in the Utah hills, he thinks he hears Palestrina; when the vast silences of the New Mexico desert engulf him, Gregorian chants ring in his head. He carries an electronic Yamaha keyboard on his travels and in taxis or during airport delays unleashes the instrument to noodle a few "stolen moments." He enjoys trivia. Learning that Schubert on his deathbed asked for James Fenimore Cooper's latest novel, Thomas sends his wit on irreverent flight. "Schubert," he says, "was fascinated by America! Can you imagine him on horseback in the American wilderness?" Breaking into a high, sweet tenor, Thomas croons his version of "Tex" Schubert:

From zis wallee zey say you are goink . . .

Oh, remember das Red Riwer Walleee . . .

Beverly Sills, who in her singing days performed under Thomas' baton, admires his good humor and energy. "He's got a nonstop mind," she says. "He's open to new ideas, and he's a delight to make music with." Leonard Bernstein, who at 71 is America's dean of conductors, took the young man's measure years ago. Thomas, he declared, "reminds me of me at that age!" That's high praise indeed from a conductor with an ego the size of Carnegie Hall.

% Almost from the beginning, comparisons with Bernstein were inevitable. Both were wunderkinder; both are excellent pianists; both made spectacular debuts in their 20s, when they were called upon to substitute for indisposed conductors; both have a strong affinity for the American musical idiom; both command a cunning show-biz flair on and off the podium.

Thomas' gift for shtick comes from his Russian-born grandfather, actor Boris Thomashefsky, who pioneered Yiddish theater in the U.S. Michael's father Ted, who shortened the family name, is a retired Hollywood writer and director. His mother Roberta adapted her own mother's nickname, Till, to invent the lilting Tilson that goes with Michael. (The British, impressed by double-barreled monikers, think his full surname is Tilson Thomas; he does not object.) Friends call him M.T.T., or Michael Tee Tee.

Michael, who was born in Los Angeles, believes his birthday, Dec. 21, has an almost mystical significance. "It's the longest night of the year and the shortest day," he explains. "So this is a very important balancing point for me -- it's where I feel my maximum strength. As the days grow shorter, I get stronger and stronger. Somehow, maybe the moment in which the clock has first started ticking and the moment when you first make your entrance into this world are important in some way."

He made his entrance into the music world at the age of three. "We had venetian blinds on the west windows," he remembers, "and in late afternoon, the light would come through at a very extreme angle. And in those bands of light were millions of little dust particles dancing. I used to stand at the piano and try to play music for the dancing dust."

By the time he reached his late teens, Michael had progressed from accompanying dancing dust to accompanying violin and cello students in the master classes of Jascha Heifetz and Gregor Piatigorsky. He was also getting solid piano instruction at the University of Southern California from John Crown, who was important not only for his teaching skills but also for his musical lineage. "Crown," says Thomas, "was a pupil of Moritz Rosenthal, and Rosenthal was a pupil of Liszt! Liszt was a pupil of Cherney, and Cherney was a pupil of Beethoven! It's really fun to think that some particular thing that I'm doing, the way I put my hands down on the keyboard, or some musical thought, some way or another comes through that line."

The line extended with further training under composer-conductor Pierre Boulez and at the Berkshire Music Festival at Tanglewood, where Thomas won the Koussevitzky Prize for conducting. By 1965 he was William Steinberg's assistant at the Boston Symphony. And then, like all understudies in show-biz song and saga, he prepared for the star to break a leg.

The break came on an October night in 1969 at New York's Philharmonic Hall. It was not a fracture that disabled the 72-year-old Steinberg but sudden fatigue. Thomas, not yet 25, was standing in the wings when the maestro walked offstage just before the intermission and told his assistant to get out there and finish the concert. Thomas proceeded to take the orchestra through a Starer concerto and Till Eulenspiegel without a slip, and the critics flipped. By 1972 he was the Boston's principal guest conductor and had his own orchestra, the Buffalo Philharmonic.

He was gifted, he was busy and he was ambitious, but he was still not ready for prime time. Veteran members of the Boston and other orchestras that he conducted found it hard to forgive an impudent kid his sudden celebrity. (When the frisky youngster appeared in New York City, recalls a former Philharmonic player, one of the musicians dubbed him Michael Tinsel Tushy.)

Inevitably, after Steinberg departed, the Boston's governing board balked at naming Thomas as full-time replacement. It was just as well. Thomas needed the maturing that eight years in the Buffalo boondocks would provide. He also needed to get his head straight. Now and then, some of his friends enjoyed sharing a little marijuana, a little cocaine. He was charged with carrying a little of both in his luggage after customs inspectors in New York City checked his gear one day in 1978. He paid a small fine, though the affair, Thomas recalls, was "scary and painful." Now, he says, he smokes nothing and drinks "interesting waters." The life of the ascetic, as well as of the aesthete, appeals to him. He gets his highs roaming in the wilderness. He likes poetry -- Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson. He keeps a journal. He reads science fiction and the Iliad.

If Sills and other influential fans had votes, M.T.T. would take over the N.Y. Philharmonic when Zubin Mehta leaves at the end of the 1991 season. There are others, though, who doubt that Thomas is the right man. The orchestra needs a more distinguished leader, they argue, one who will electrify audiences and increase record sales. Thomas lacks sufficient public following; he has not yet demonstrated the infectious fervor of a Bernstein or the Olympian stature of a Karajan. Says Thomas prudently: "I don't think I'm going to be asked."

In any event, he has already assured himself of a special place in music with the successful development of the New World Symphony. Its 90 members, none older than 30, are avid music-school graduates who get a $300 weekly stipend the year round and free living quarters in a converted Miami Beach hotel. They are given three years in which to land a professional job elsewhere -- or get out. In the two years since the group started, 30 players have moved on to steady positions. The orchestra, Thomas says, is "a very important expression of my idealism. We can give these kids a foundation at the very beginning, so they won't burn out and so they can keep their souls together. I've told them that whoever has his soul at the end of 50 years of music making will be the winner."

He may be right. The kids adore Thomas and under his tutelage are learning the meaning of happy and sad. If they can keep their souls intact, they, and generations of their successors, should one day occupy the majority of chairs in the nation's best orchestras. And that, for the sake of music making, is not just chicken soup.