I saw something sad last night. Michael Tilson Thomas came to DC and conducted the National Symphony in Mahler's Resurrection. It was sad not because of MTT, who even in bad health exhibited mastery over the score with complete clarity of technique and nuanced requests, but because of the always frustrating NSO, an orchestra like the New York Philharmonic which has some of the greatest musicians on earth yet still manages to give dozens of mediocre performances every year. They obviously weren't watching him and it was clearly making MTT furious. He was a prefect gentleman to them in curtain calls but they emphatically didn't deserve it.
Even so, the irony is that it's the best live performance I've ever heard from MTT, who in spite of the unhappiness onstage delivered plenty of magic moments along the way. But over the years I've heard him do a really boring Petrushka, a good but not great Rite of Spring, and some not particularly inspiring Beethoven. It's odd because on record he can make orchestras incandescent, but I've found it rare that the atmosphere of his recordings are captured in concert.
Here's a Sacre from MTT that, a few fluffs aside, is absolutely transcendent and certainly better than what I heard live from them a few years ago. Just listen to the Games of the Rival Tribes - one of the very few performances that follows Stravinsky's almost impossible tempo, and handles Igor's virtuoso polyrhythms as though they're no trouble at all. This is MTT at his incredibly inspiring best - usually in 20th century music, with a modernist aesthetic. Like Rattle, what he clearly loves is 20th century repertoire, and he plays it with all the warm familiarity of 19th century music. But while everybody else seems to have heard Rattle screw the pooch in concert, I've never heard Rattle not deliver everything - but regarding MTT, I have never heard him deliver everything a concert with him promises.
David Zinman, on the other hand, always delivers - something I even realized as a kid. In The Wire, a detective who had real ability and really cared was called 'good police.' Zinman is 'good music.' And among the major American conductors, I sometimes wonder if he's the only one who was 'good music.'
If I hadn't been hearing the best conductor in the history of this country every week, I doubt classical music would have stuck. And now that he's in his 80s and beset with Parkinson's like symptoms, he's somehow better than ever. His biggest problem was always that he was too controlling, but now he has to let go, and the result is that the sound glows with that spiritual embrace only present in the greatest of masters. As great, exciting, and fun as Zinman's always been, I've always ceded pride of place among his generation to conductors who relaxed a little to let the poetry bloom: Dohnanyi, Jansons, etc...
None of the other Americans deliver like this. Bernstein is less a conductor than a genius of music who coasted on spontaneous combustion. He either provided transcendence or awfulness and nothing in between. Maazel made a fetish of technique, and did a lifelong imitation of emotional expression - listening to him is like going to the dentist. Previn was great in the shallow stuff, but the more depth the music needed, the more lost he got. Schippers was a very good opera conductor but we're sadly missing at least thirty years of his career. Slatkin just has nothing like Zinman's force of personality - nearly everything is just the music in outline (except... weirdly... English music, which he does better than nearly any Englishman). Levine, moral issues aside, had every musical gift except a personality - everything was in place yet it usually expressed nothing. And MTT, it becomes more apparent with every live concert, never quite knew what to do once the young flash went away.
Only Zinman has that mixture of basic musical values and individuality.
He deserves a Blomstedtian victory lap. He deserves a concert every year in front of every major orchestra and festival. He is the ultimate sign that musicians produced here can deliver great music that concedes nothing to anywhere in Europe.
MTT delivered regularly in SF over a long period. Stunning Stravinsky, great Mahler, some great Beethoven, Berg, Schubert, and more.
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