An exacting critic, Martin Bernheimer paid a special tribute to Michael Tilson Thomas in the Financial Times after the San Francisco Symphony music director led his other orchestra, the New World Symphony, in a Carnegie Hall concert:
Tilson Thomas, at 70 no longer a wunderkind but still, emphatically, a wunder, led the proceedings with equal parts verve and introspection. A discerning technician and an inquisitive scholar, he must be the most intellectual, most creative conductor this side of Pierre Boulez.
It was a typically adventurous program for the Miami training orchestra on its tour with the music of Schubert, Debussy, the Berg Violin Concerto, and the New York premiere of a rarity, Norbert Moret's 1988 En rêve, performed by violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, a champion of the late Swiss composer.
Founded by MTT 27 years ago, New World Symphony is getting rave reviews on this tour, including the New York Times:
The program ended with an uncommonly incisive and, when called for, blazingly brassy account of Debussy’s “La Mer.” Mr. Thomas’s aim, it seemed, was to put aside assumptions about this score as a high point of lovely Impressionism, and instead treat it as something feisty, as radical as anything written at the start of the 20th century.
It was good to see so many young people attending the concert. Some of them, I suspect, might have been former members of the New World Symphony, which has so far sent some 950 musicians into the field.
During the orchestra's stay in New York, MTT announced an important new program, a website dedicated to the music of John Cage.
The free website, called “Making the Right Choices: A John Cage Celebration,” is a record of the Miami celebration of John Cage’s 100th birthday in 2013, when MTT and the orchestra presented a week-long festival of Cage’s music. Some of the videos on the site capture live events, others take the performances much further, "adding layers of visual interpretation that provide deeper insight into the spirit of his works," according to the website's overview statement.
"The diversity of Cage's music inspired us to use all the capabilities of our ensemble and of our building to present his works in installations designed for them," MTT said. "The videos on the website are, in some cases, reportage of those installations. In other cases they are new video works based on the experiences of the live performances."