by Petruș Costea
In the twenty years he has been a director of the San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas has introduced work written by an American composer in almost all concert programs. In 2000, he conceived the „American Mavericks“ Festival, dedicated to vanguard composers such as Edgar Varèse, Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell or Lou Harrison, and in 2012 he organized the second edition of this festival, introducing works by Meredith Monk, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Osvaldo Golijov, Frank Zappa or Terry Riley. Being aware of the event`s importance Michael Tilson Thomas stated that „it is not an ordinary festival, but rather it is an huge celebration where we can listen to new music and I can assure you that the message is not a boring, heavy, difficult music, as it was sixty years ago. These are very original pieces.“
In a desire to play outside the system and to avoid the „show managers` mafia“, he has encouraged the YouTube Orchestra project. The first concert took place in 2009 at Carnegie Hall and the orchestra was formed by 101 musicians who came from thirty-two countries around the globe. The auditions were carried out on YouTube and each instrument player who was interested was able to post their own recordings. The following year, the orchestra gave a concert in Sydney and the jury who recruited the 300 finalists was formed out of the heads of Berlin Philharmonic or London Symphony Orchestra. The night of the concert, which was broad casted live on YouTube, Michael Tilson Thomas – after playing Firebird by Stravinsky – thanked fagot player Laurenţiu Darie, the only Romanian in the orchestra, for the way he played the difficult solo fagot. This was the most watched live concert on YouTube: over 33 million people.
In 2006, the Keeping Score program was launched for the same educational purpose. This program was a mixture between an accessible conference and a documentary and its aim was to present to the public at large some known classical music pieces. Up to now, several DVDs were produced with pieces by Beethoven, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Ives, Stravinsky, Shostakovich.
