Conquering the suites of San Francisco

We loved him as the LSO's conductor, but Michael Tilson Thomas still had to prove himself in the States.

Now he's back for the Proms, to the delight of MICHAEL WHITE

AMERICAN West-Coast life is invariably presented as funloving and frivolous by comparison with the serious East. For a West-Coast orchestra like the San Francisco Symphony - which comes to the Albert Hall for two high-profile Proms later this month - it's a mixed blessing. "Sure, it's a great life here," a member of the orchestra told me when I was in the city, "but there's an issue of credibility. We have a lot to prove."

For years the Symphony had proved itself with Herbert Blomstedt as conductor. Serious-minded Blomstedt was a Swedish Seventh-Day Adventist with high ideals and an abhorrence of alcohol. At chic receptions he asked for milk. He was good for credibility and made some fine recordings with the orchestra, including the best cycle of Nielsen symphonies you'll find on disc.

But five years ago, when Blomstedt left, the Symphony threw caution to the wind and installed Michael Tilson Thomas as his successor.

There is a big difference between the two men. First, Tilson Thomas is American, which is not an attribute American orchestras tend to prize.

Every one of the Big Five Ivy-League American ensembles imports its music director from abroad.

But more than that, Tilson Thomas has an off-the-shoulder showbiz glamour which might well have given San Francisco pause for thought. In London we know all about it because he used to be the chief conductor of the LSO. We loved the swank, the chutzpah and the dynamism that he brought to Barbican performances of Mahler, Bernstein and Stravinsky. Maybe we didn't rush to hear him conduct Brahms and Beethoven. But in 20th-century scores he had a great, listenerfriendly allure that helped make the LSO the finest orchestra in Britain.

San Francisco, though, had different needs. To "prove" itself, it wanted gravitas. And in the judgment of his critics, all it stood to get from Tilson Thomas was a hyperactive local boy made good.

MTT (as they call him in the business) is certainly local. He was brought up in Hollywood and cut his musical teeth as a boy-conductor with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

CHAMPIONED by Bernstein (who said of him: "He reminds me of me at that age, except he knows more"), he rose like yeast out of the rank and file of young American conductors and was tipped for various hot- seat jobs that all eluded him - for reasons that remain unclear. Some say he was too arrogant, some that he was too openly gay (his personal manager is also his long-term partner: they were at school together), but perhaps the truth is that he simply wasn't ready. Coming to the LSO was, arguably, his long-delayed coming of age.

But through the years he regularly guest-conducted back in San Francisco, notching up 100 concerts by the time his appointment with the orchestra began in 1995. As an orchestral spokesman puts it: "We dated for two decades before marrying. Five years down the line, I'm glad to say the sex is still hot."

And by common consent that really is the case.

Five years ago the San Francisco Symphony was in trouble. The musicians went on strike - notoriously - and the status of the orchestra was definitely less than Ivy League. But now its partnership with MTT is widely thought the most exciting orchestra/ conductor package in the USA. The local boy really has made good. And against all the odds, he's done it largely on the back of local repertory: music by all-American composers like Carl Ruggles and Aaron Copland which the orchestra is bringing to the Proms.

IN fact, the Symphony has just completed a whole American Mavericks festival devoted to this kind of work and running at its home base: an impressive 1980s temple to the arts called Davies Hall which occupies a whole block in what San Francisco proudly calls its Cultural District. It was there, shell-shocked by a relentless schedule of rehearsals and performances, that Tilson Thomas prised his eyelids open and talked me through the age-old problems of prophets in their own lands.

"For years we Americans dismissed our own art because you Europeans told us it was no good. But we kept on doing it. And now people are saying: give us modern music that's attractive and melodious. Well here it is, right on their doorstep. All the time. And San Francisco is a good place to be making this point because audiences here are less fixed in their listening than in other places. OK, there's a sense of the West Coast being on the fringes of a cultural world that looks the other way, to New York and Boston. But that can be an advantage. It means we make our own connections. We find out for ourselves. And there's so much to find in these American pioneer composers.

"Their music isn't bound by rules.

They just rolled up their sleeves and did it - with results like the houses here in San Francisco, which were usually built without an architect.

They're not always masterpieces but they're fascinating. And in any case, we're not obsessed by masterpieces in these parts. The need to divide the world into A and B lists, that's European."

Michael Tilson Thomas conducts the San Francisco Symphony at the Proms on Wednesday 30 and Thursday 31 August. Programmes include Carl Ruggles and Aaron Copland.

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