MTT's Grace a Fitting, Comprehensive Tribute

Pentatone has gone all out for Grace: The Music of Michael Tilson Thomas, an attractive boxed set containing four CDs and an extensively annotated booklet. The photographs alone may be worth the price of admission, including a young MTT hugging his mentor Leonard Bernstein and, in another picture, hugging Audrey Hepburn.

The overlaid polyrhythms of Lope, one of MTT’s excursions into minimalism, are handled with assurance by the New World Symphony (NWS), of which MTT is longtime founding artistic director, now laureate. Bay Street Brass perform Street Song, which combines jazz and ostinatos.  Also included is From the Diary of Anne Frank, narrated with poignant sincerity by Sarah Leonard; the SFS players’ luminous lyricism never lapses into sentimentality.

Like his mentor, MTT has written for both operatic and musical theater voices, here performed by a bevy of sterling vocalists. Mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke and pianist Jean-Yves Thibeaudet provide a winsome rendition of Not Everyone Thinks That I’m Beautiful, a ballad written in the 1980s with a tender vocal line and colorful harmonic palette. The duo returns to perform Grace, which alternates between cabaret and gospel stylings. Soprano Renée Fleming contributes Poems of Emily Dickinson with impressive versatility in dynamics, inflection, and fluid runs. The piece seems clearly to be a hat tip to Copland, and it contains some of MTT’s best music for voice.

An additional Dickinson setting, I’m Nobody Who Are You?, is performed by soprano Measha Brueggergosman-Lee, violist Carrie VanSlyke, and pianist Jeremy VanSlyke. Melismas, fleetly performed by Brueggergosman-Lee, and a syncopated rhythm in hand claps, piano, and a viola countermelody, make for a quirkily different approach to Dickinson. Thomas Hampson interprets another standout, Whitman Songs, the baritone’s thoughtful declamation well-matched in the orchestra’s stirring accompaniment. Audra MacDonald applies her exquisite phrasing and golden, bluesy tone to Sentimental Again, another song influenced by the language of Golden Age Broadway musicals. Cooke returns to join Ryan McKinny in Meditations on Rilke, which combine cabaret-style passages with ebullient neo-romanticism. McKinny’s lower register is appealingly resonant, and he also verges into falsetto hums. Cooke allows her own tone to bloom in a way she doesn’t in the popular selections. The music is uneven but offers a nonetheless compelling pastiche.

Brueggergosman-Lee is joined by NWS on the half-hour-long Four Preludes on the Wind. It affords a number of the players, particularly in the winds and brass, angular neo-classical solos, once again with a bit of swing shared for good measure. The soprano’s breathless first entry is immediately followed by a zesty electric guitar solo buoyed by saxophones, brass, and boisterous rhythms. The piece then proceeds to a neo-romantic interlude.  Brueggergosman-Lee uses multiple vocal timbres, some more based in the world of opera, others in gospel and blues; the voice moves fluidly through glissandos and runs. The fusion instrumentation returns, this time with the soloist continuing and group vocals added, and these various elements are juxtaposed throughout the rest of the piece. This kind of effusive postmodernism may have passed its sell-by date, but Four Preludes on the Wind is as compelling as Frank Zappa and David Del Tredici in like-minded outings.

MTT has a cancer diagnosis, and his days may not be long. It is fortunate that Grace has come out now, when he can see his work as composer be rightfully celebrated . MTT’s music, at is best, is well worthy of wider currency.

Grace: The Music of Michael Tilson Thomas
Pentatone CD boxed set ($96.99)/download ($45.96)
San Francisco Symphony, New World Symphony, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas; various artists.

Pictured: Measha Brueggergosman-Lee

Classical music coverage on Musical America is supported in part by a grant from the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation. Musical America makes all editorial decisions.