Financial Times / February 18, 2002
   The Arts / New York / Music

   AMAZING GRACE

   By Martin Bernheimer

   New York, according to sublimely delusional New Yorkers, is the center
   of America's cultural universe.  Maybe the world's.  Everything else
   is just "out-of-town." But, as the great tenorino Vito Sportivo
   enjoyed reminding all and sundry (especially sundry), it ain't
   necessarily so.

   It certainly ain't so when it comes to orchestral adventure.  The
   stodgy New York Philharmonic is all but stagnating under the lame-duck
   leadership of its Old World maestro, Kurt Masur, and the immediate
   future under Lorin Maazel looms ominous.  Meanwhile, a couple of
   symphonic mavericks are making interesting music, their way, in the
   not-so-wild west.  Esa-Pekka Salonen has inaugurated a new aura, and
   era, of vitality with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  A bit farther
   north, Michael Tilson Thomas has managed to rejuvenate the San
   Francisco Symphony.

   Wednesday night, joining an endless parade of orchestral invaders,
   it was Thomas' turn to show his wares at Carnegie Hall.  He did so
   with exceptional flair, which was expected, and with a fine degree
   of drama, which wasn't.

   The programme, cautious by this conductor's standards, examined two
   sides of a Germanic romanticism in decay.  The first half exposed
   the lean expressive agonies of Arnold Schoenberg.  The second explored
   the lush ecstasies of Gustav Mahler.

   As a sardonic overture of sorts, Thomas chose Schoenberg's "Theme
   and Variations" of 1943, a surprisingly jaunty, almost hummable,
   astonishingly compact collection of essays in orchestral convolution.
   The maestro toyed knowingly with the creative contradictions, kept
   the momentum brisk and the textures clean.  The San Franciscans
   responded to his measured urgings with the sort of virtuosity that
   insists on seeming casual.

   In Schoenberg's "Five Pieces for Orchestra," which followed, Thomas
   managed to untie the progressive linear knots and clarify the harmonic
   haze as if he were dealing with five easy pieces.  For all the dark
   undertones, it all sounded elegant, even graceful.  So much for the
   abstraction and Angst of 1909.

   "Das Lied von der Erde," which followed the interval, was completed
   the same year, and Thomas no doubt savored the statistical irony.
   In surveying Mahler's rapturous Weltschmerz, he enforced the same
   degrees of orchestral discipline, respected the same demands for
   transparency and propulsion.  But he took enlightened liberties
   here---opting for broad tempos and generous fluctuations within them,
   daring to linger over subtle details, luxuriating in the harmonic
   opulence.  Most important, he managed to sustain tension over the
   long haul, without blurring the elusive line that separates bathos
   from pathos.

   He found a most sympathetic ally in Thomas Hampson, who sang the
   lower solos with bel-canto warmth, rapt concentration, characteristic
   introspection and dynamic sensitivity.  The final "Abschied" took
   the audience's breath away, if not the baritone's.  Less successful,
   unfortunately, was Michael Schade, latest in a long line of good
   lyric tenors fazed by Mahler's unreasonable demands for poetry,
   flexibility and power at both range extremes.

Janos Gereben/SF
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