San Francisco Symphony

MTT leads a semi-staged performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio, May 27, 2004

2003–04

FOR THE CURIOUS

02–03

04–05

In festivals with MTT, music is heard in novel contexts. “I’m always interested in exploring what I don’t know and connecting the dots in a different way,” MTT says. “I try to encourage and provoke those same qualities in the audience.” In spring 2004, MTT programs the music of Beethoven alongside those of his now-neglected contemporaries in the season’s curiosity-inspired Beethoven’s Vienna: Scenes from a Musical Revolution festival.

MTT and Lisa Vroman perform during the Beethoven’s Vienna festival, May 2004

A MUSIC REVOLUTION:

BEETHOVEN’S VIENNA FESTIVAL

MTT and the San Francisco Symphony enter the musical world that gave birth to the revolutionary Eroica Symphony with Beethoven’s Vienna: Scenes from a Musical Revolution, an expansive festival that boasts stunning semi-staged performances of Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio; an engaging symposium on the music of early 19th-century composers, famed in their day but since neglected; and an intriguing musical journey concert exploring the breadth of the composer’s musical styles. Woven throughout the festival are aspects of Beethoven’s seminal work, the Symphony No. 3, Eroica. It’s too good to experience only once: An acclaimed Keeping Score episode emerges from this uniquely framed festival.

[Mahler’s] Sixth looks unflinchingly at the obsessive, destructive nature of man, the unremitting capacity of humankind to hurt itself. . .Mahler said that a symphony should mirror life. His entire symphonic output is a testament to that belief, and nowhere did he realize this credo so powerfully as in his Sixth Symphony. ”

— Michael Tilson Thomas

MTT is presented with a Grammy Award for the recording of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, March 3, 2004

This recording of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony was made from performances planned long before the events of September 11 gave the San Francisco Symphony’s choice of repertory extraordinary resonance. . . .Certainly a more impressive start to Tilson Thomas and the SFS’s Mahler cycle is difficult to imagine. Less mannered than Bernstein, and more emotionally engaged than Karajan, this is an exceptionally intense and, under the circumstances, remarkably coherent performance that is not to be missed.
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— Gramophone