Bird with Inward Fire

Striding onstage, shoulders hunched forward, elbows flapping at the side, Prince Charles hair sliding forward over one eye, Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas looks like a big bird impersonating an adolescent. Mounting the podium, this shambling creature bows low--to the audience, to the orchestra--then, in some sort of mystical transformation, comes up a man. With a snap, the backbone locks firmly into place. The right hand is suddenly holding the baton high over the head. Slowly, powerfully, the left hand rises like a warning semaphore. Quickly, precisely, the right hand gives the downbeat.

That was the way Thomas began Mozart's Requiem at the "Mostly Mozart Festival" in Manhattan's Philharmonic Hall last week. A remarkably mature performance, it confirmed an opinion that has been growing since late last fall: at 25, Thomas is perhaps the most naturally gifted young conductor to come along since Leonard Bernstein more than a generation ago.

Mozart's Requiem, written as the 35-year-old composer lay dying, is one of those unearthly, suprahuman creations that are virtually impossible for conductors to turn into personal statements. Thomas' performance lacked a certain reflective delicacy that might have made the work more of a requiem and less of a showpiece, but he clearly demonstrated that as a conductor he is thoroughly capable of reaching his performers in the grand style defined long ago by Hector Berlioz: "His inward fire warms them, his electric glow animates them, his form of impulse excites them."

The young conductor's electric glow first became visible last October when William Steinberg, music director of the Boston Symphony, fell ill midway through a visiting concert, also at Philharmonic Hall. Thomas, the orchestra's new assistant conductor and Steinberg's understudy, took over after intermission and handled Strauss's familiar Till Eulenspiegel and Robert Starer's new Concerto for Violin, Cello and Orchestra with ease, poise and cool. Said the New York Times next day: "Mr. Thomas knows his business, and we shall be hearing from him again."

Steinberg later suffered a mild heart attack and had to give up most of the 1969-70 season; Thomas conducted 34 of the Boston Symphony's concerts and was on the podium at its spring recording sessions. The first results, Ives' Three Places in New England and Ruggles' Sun-Treader, soon to be released on a DGG LP, is 20th century music making at its best. Having established himself as a splendid standin, Thomas was asked to fly to London on short notice in May to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra. He was brilliant, especially in Stravinsky's Huxley Variations, a fiercely difficult musical mosaic that he seamed together with high craftsmanship. Said Stuart Knussen, principal double bass and board chairman of the cooperatively run orchestra, "He is one of those unique complete musicians who seem to appear, if at all, in America. We don't have them in England."

The U.S. does not produce many either. An oboist, brilliant pianist and sometime composer ("mostly for myself"), Thomas has been conducting professionally since the age of 20, when he became the leader of the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra in his native Los Angeles. Since then, he has worked as an assistant to Pierre Boulez at Bayreuth and California's Ojai Festival, rehearsed the orchestra for the famous Heifetz-Piatigorsky concerts. If Thomas seems to enjoy the performing aspects of conducting, that is natural. His grandfather, Boris Thomashefsky, was a founder of the Yiddish theater in New York. His father is Film Maker Ted Thomas; Paul Muni was a cousin.

Humility and Hubris, A symphony orchestra is one of civilization's most highly and delicately collaborative creations. To preside over one requires an odd mixture of mind, heart and common sense as well as a less tangible quality sometimes called animal magnetism, or sheer sex appeal. Thomas seems to possess all these qualities in good measure. For one so successful and so young, he also seems to have a remarkably good balance between humility and hubris. In rehearsal he has no hesitation in asking the orchestra's advice on how to get effects. "At the end of last season," he says, speaking of his relations with the Boston Symphony, "when we did the Mahler Ninth, I realized how much I'd learned from them. And as I find out more, I can demand more." But when he reaches the podium there is never any doubt whose will is being done.

Thomas is already reaching magisterially for the big sound and carrying both audiences and orchestras with him. But reach does not always equal grasp--in conducting, particularly. With all his gifts, Thomas has a long road ahead. It will take years, as well as accession to the control of a symphony orchestra, for him to set his mark--as a great conductor must--upon a repertory of music and a group of musicians. No one is more willing to learn, however. It is probably lucky for him, and for the Boston Symphony, that he puts himself to sleep at night reading Haydn scores instead of mystery stories.

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