Hello, New York! This is Michael Tilson Thomas here. Looking forward to being back in the city
with the New York Philharmonic for the first time in about 10 years. It's a special joy to
be able to lead the New York Philharmonic in a performance of Beethoven's "Eroica."
His third symphony that has been with me my whole life and in fact
seems to symbolize many different pathways that life can offer. After years of doing the Beethoven
symphonies I think that the "Eroica" remains the most challenging to conceive and to bring off.
It has such a weightiness around it. The idea of it being the heroic piece of the dedication
to Napoleon, which the scratched out dedication, Beethoven's many moods, the huge funeral march.
It somehow takes on a kind of monumentality. But for me the idea of the life of the
hero is one that I associate with Beethoven's perceptions of himself. The piece starts out just
a lovely, lyrical piece and only midway through the first movement does it begin to
run into obstacles, which are greeted with hostility, rage, renunciation, and gradually a
beginning of a concept of the creation of a kind of new life, of a new way of communicating with
people, a new way of re-establishing intimacy with people even as his hearing was causing the world
of communication with other people to be more and more restricted. In the end the piece ends
triumphantly using the most simple, almost silly means to build something that is
transfiguring, something that was one of Beethoven's special talents to do.
And on this concert also I'm going to be reunited with Gil Shaham in a performance of Berg's Violin
Concerto. This piece also has been key to my whole life. I first performed it with Henryk Szeryng and
the Israel Philharmonic quite a number of times and I'm so grateful to Maestro Szeryng for having
really opened my eyes to both the adventurous and very lyrical nature of the piece. Again the piece
contemplates death but like the Beethoven it also goes beyond that to a
really beautiful, big vision of what the totality of life is
in our whole planet and in the whole universe. This was a piece that I always imagined that Gil
would play and for years I was after him as we were touring around the world doing other pieces
I said "You got to do the Berg Concerto. You got to do the Berg Concerto." Finally,
took at least five years for me to convince him to do it, he came down to the New World Symphony
and with lots of rehearsals and lots of time to rethink and try out one thing or another.
Recently we recorded the piece with the San Francisco Symphony in a performance that I
think many people find particularly captivating. For us it's returning to a beautiful, vulnerable
space and being able to share the depth of our feelings about it with you. And of course
it wouldn't be an MTT program without some American music so we opened with a very short,
but visionary piece by Ruth Crawford Seeger. It's her Andante for Strings, a really breakthrough
piece of American music from the 1930s, which took ideas that Schoenberg had played around with but
took them forward into a sort of soundscape that wouldn't be explored again until the 60s and 70s
with the music of Ligeti and others. She was a very, very gifted composer and upon having married
Charles Seeger devoted most of her attention to musicology especially to work in folk music,
something which was a great influence on her stepson Pete Seeger whose connection with folk
music and with the Library of Congress connections and something that has enriched American lives in
completely other ways. So it's a great amalgam of people all connected with many musical cultures
abstracting, condensing, and polishing to diamond-like brilliance the strength
of these messages. Can't wait to share all of this with you. See you soon at Alice Tully Hall.