San Francisco Symphony / Michael Tilson Thomas BERG Violin Concerto - Seven Early Songs - Three Pieces for Orchestra

 

VIOLIN CONCERTO

 

San Francisco Symphony MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS From the Diary of Anne Frank - Meditations on Rilke

FROM THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK

San Francisco Symphony / Michael Tilson Thomas BERLIOZ Roméo et Juliette

Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony bring unsurpassed storytelling to their latest recording on the Grammy Award-winning SFS Media label: Berlioz’s dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette With a narrative that Berlioz deemed "too beautiful, too musical" to not be performed, this Impassioned orchestral scoring of love and despair is further enriched by the vocals of Sasha Cooke, Nicholas Phan, Luca Pisaroni, and the SFS Chorus. 

“Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette is a true sonic spectacular—the scale of the piece and the positioning of the large orchestra, very large chorus, and soloists is extraordinary. This recording allows all of these wonderful forces to be heard clearly and with incredible majesty.” (Michael Tilson Thomas)

San Francisco Symphony / Michael Tilson Thomas TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 6, Pathétique

Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony announce the release of Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6, Pathétique, on June 29. Recorded during live performances at Davies Symphony Hall in March 2017, this latest release from the SF Symphony’s eight-time Grammy Award-winning in-house recording label, SFS Media, will be available for streaming and download in stereo, 5.1 surround, Mastered for iTunes quality, and 24-bit/192kHz Studio Master. “Returning to world of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony is a profound experience for me at this point in my life,” explains Michael Tilson Thomas. “There were a number of years where I had to distance myself from the symphony as I could not come to a peaceful solution as to how to give it the delicacy and vulnerability, as well as the enormous power that it so often requires. This recording represents a stage in my thinking that is based in the world of elegance and of what I believe the word Pathétique means. To me, Tchaikovsky is saying, ‘Here is my simple story. Please listen to me and hear me.’ This Symphony, an amazingly constructed piece, is an outpouring of elegant melodic invention.” This release joins an impassioned MTT-led disc of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 and Romeo and Juliet, also on SFS Media (2015), and the acclaimed inaugural episode of the Keeping Score documentary series which explored Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 (2004).

BERNSTEIN ON BROADWAY

Bernstein's most popular and best-loved melodies from West Side Story, Candide & On the Town. Featuring the composer as conductor in West Side Story, one of the greatest musicals of all time, and in Candide, a visionary work with a dazzling score. Bernstein protégé Michael Tilson Thomas conducts On the Town. Featuring all-star casts, with artists including José Carreras, Kiri Te Kanawa, Marilyn Horne, Thomas Hampson, Christa Ludwig, Frederica von Stade, June Anderson, and Jerry Hadley. 

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) was a man of many roles – composer, conductor, pianist, musical educator – a man hailed by pianist Arthur Rubinstein as a “universal genius”. A charismatic communicator, he had few equals when it came to enthusing others about music. Whether at festivals such as Tanglewood in the US or Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany, in a TV studio or in a university lecture hall, Bernstein’s presence, passion and unquestioned commitment to his art were palpable.

That same intensity also characterised his work as a performer. A number of his recordings still have reference status – his Mahler cycle, for instance, or Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with Bernstein himself at the piano. The son of a Ukrainian immigrant, he knew no musical boundaries: he played jazz, engaged with Jewish folk traditions, and was as at home on Broadway as he was in Europe’s venerable opera houses. In his own music seriousness stands cheek by jowl with satire, musical with Mass, the modern with the traditional. His reinterpretation of Beethoven’s Ninth as an “Ode to Freedom” in Berlin, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, was simply unforgettable. Less than a year later, he died of cancer. 

Michael Tilson Thomas / San Francisco Symphony ADAMS Harmonielehre - Short Ride in a Fast Machine

By 2012, the San Francisco Symphony had played about two dozen of John Adams' works, about half of them world premiere or U.S. premiere performances, including seven pieces it commissioned, so it has easy claim on the title of being THE orchestra for Adams performances. Adams wrote the massive Harmonielehre for the orchestra while he was its Composer in Residence, and Edo de Waart led the premiere in 1985. This live 2010 performance with Michael Tilson Thomas leading the orchestra marks the 25th anniversary of the piece. This performance is so extraordinarily fine that it would be pointless to quibble over whether or not it surpasses the terrific original recording with de Waart, but it certainly gives it a run for its money, and may for some listeners have an edge. In any case, it is incalculably superior to its only other real competition with Simon Rattle leading the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. The extraordinarily clear, lively sound of SFS Media's sonically spectacular SACD allows details of orchestration to be heard with fresh brilliance and makes this a version no one who loves the piece will want to be without. Harmonielehre is an exhausting, exhilarating work in the way a late Romantic symphony can be, and Tilson Thomas masterfully conveys the complex score's emotional volatility with appropriately startling ferocity. The explosive, pounding chords of the opening of the first movement are viscerally shocking, and Tilson Thomas maintains a sense of the music's urgency though its extended roller coaster of mood shifts. The second movement, "The Anfortas Wound," is a ferocious howl of pain and frustration that Adams said characterizes his anguish over the extended period of writer's block that finally gave way to the composition of Harmonielehre. Tilson Thomas brings catharsis in the shimmering, luminous final movement, "Meister Eckhardt and Quackie." The orchestra's playing throughout is superb: absolutely secure technically, with a luscious, vibrant tone, and with the interpretive and idiomatic depth that comes from intimate familiarity with the music. The album includes a sparkling, propulsive reading of Short Ride in a Fast Machine from a live 2011 performance. Highly recommended. (Stephen Eddins)

San Francisco Symphony / Michael Tilson Thomas MASON BATES Works for Orchestra

Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) and the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) will release a new recording featuring Bay Area composer Mason Bates’ s three largest electro - acoustic orchestral works on the Orchestra’s Grammy Award - winning SFS Media label on Friday, March 11, 2016. The album of Bates’s largest orchestral works features the first recordings of the SFS - commissioned The B - Sides and Liquid Interface, in addition to Alternative Energy . These three works illustrate Bates’s exuberantly inventive music that expands the symphonic palette with sounds of the digital age: techno, drum‘n’bass, field recordings and more, with the composer performing on electronica . MTT and the SFS have championed Bates’s works for over a decade, evolving a partnership built on multi-year commissioning, performing, recording, and touring projects .

“The three pieces on this album are my largest electro - acoustic works, my wildest explorations into the power of an expanded symphonic palette and its implications for imaginative new forms,” said Mason Bates. “The sounds range from glaciers to industrial techno to a NASA spacewalk. New sounds have of ten provoked new forms throughout music history... and I look to the digital world as an important twenty-first century expansion of the orchestral sound world.”

Michael Tilson Thomas / New World Symphony Orchestra MORTON FELDMAN Coptic Light

It's difficult to explain why Morton Feldman's music is so hot these days. Quiet, uneventful, dissonant, and often extremely lengthy, his works don't seem all that accessible on paper. But hearing is believing, as they say, and unlike some avant-garde music, appreciation of Feldman's art requires no understanding of arcane forms or compositional techniques. Perhaps this is because Feldman was influenced more by the abstract paintings of Philip Guston and Mark Rothko than by the music of any of his contemporaries. Listen to "Coptic Light" 1986 -- one of the composer's final works and his orchestral masterpiece -- a hypnotic kaleidoscope of slowly shifting colors, with no melody and no discernible rhythmic patterns, just wave after wave of gorgeously gauzy sound. This music is so colorful and finely textured that you can almost see and feel it. In fact, experiencing it fully requires your visual and tactile senses as much as your hearing. Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas draws expressively serene performances from the Miami-based New World Symphony. Pianist Alan Feinberg finds infinite shades of pianissimo in the simply-titled "Piano and Orchestra," and cellist Robert Cohen imbues the spare yet profound lines of "Cello and Orchestra" with intensely quiet yearning. This extraordinary recording should be snatched up by Feldman's growing legion of fans and win many new converts, as well. (Andrew Farach-Colton)

Overlapping textures and soft, shifting timbres are the most recognizable features of Morton Feldman's music, and his attractive sonorities draw listeners in ways other avant-garde sound structures may not. This music's appeal is also attributable to its gentle ambience, a static, meditative style that Feldman pioneered long before trance music became commonplace. The three works on this disc are among Feldman's richest creations, yet the material in each piece is subtly layered and integrated so well that many details will escape detection on first hearing. In "Piano and Orchestra," the piano is treated as one texture among many, receding to the background and blending with muted brass and woodwinds in a wash of colors. "Cello and Orchestra" might seem like a conventional concerto movement, especially since the cellist is centrally placed on this recording and plays with a rather lyrical tone. However, Feldman's orchestral clusters are dense and interlocked, which suggests that the cello should be less prominent and blend more into the mass of sounds behind it. No such ambiguity exists in the performance of "Coptic Light," which Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony Orchestra play with even dynamics and careful attention to the work's aggregate effect, which is mesmerizing. (Blair Sanderson)