Code-breaker

"Keeping Score: revealing classical music"
Michael Tilson Thomas & San Francisco Symphony
beginning Oct. 15 on public television stations

Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony, returns for a second season of "Keeping Score," his public-television series exploring major symphonic works, this time delving into Hector Berlioz’s "Symphonie fantastique," the "Holidays" Symphony of Charles Ives and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony.

The series begins with the Berlioz episode. This should be of special interest locally, as the Richmond Symphony, with music-director candidate Christian Knapp, is playing the "Symphonie fantastique" over the weekend.

MTT, as he’s popularly known, devoted the first season of "Keeping Score" to Beethoven’s "Eroica" Symphony, Stravinsky’s "The Rite of Spring" and the "Americana" works of Aaron Copland, which broke old compositional molds and sent music in new directions. In this series, the conductor plays code-breaker, explaining how Berlioz, Ives and Shostakovich manipulated melodies and orchestrations to create musical autobiographies and sound sketches reflecting the societies in which they lived and worked.

Berlioz’s "Symphonie fantastique" is the most overtly autobiographical of the three works, a fevered dream of an artist’s romantic obsession. The artist, of course, is Berlioz. His obsession, and the symphony's idée fixe, was Harriet Smithson, an Irish actress whose Shakespeare productions were a sensation in Paris in the late 1820s. Smithson was not aware of Berlioz's infatuation as he wrote the symphony and premiered it in 1830; after she attended a performance of a revised version of the symphony and its sequel, "Lélio," in 1832, the two moved on to successful courtship and unsuccessful marriage.

MTT tells this tale, on location in Paris and in the composer’s hometown, La Côte-Saint-André in the Alpine foothills of southeastern France, with his customary combination of conversational ease and sophisticated musical analysis. Tilson Thomas, who was a protégé of Leonard Bernstein, adapts the old master’s model of verbal presentation with a cooler on-screen persona and more frequent use of wry humor and irony. (His quip about Smithson "waltz[ing] by, her idée fixe trailing after her," is classic MTT.)

One imagines Bernstein making more of the intellectual-historical currents behind Berlioz and the "Symphonie fantastique" – the aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleonic era, the rise of romanticism in literature and the performing arts. MTT glosses over this background in a few sentences, keeping his idée mostly fixed on Berlioz, Smithson and the composition she inspired.

Members of the San Francisco Symphony join the conductor in explicating Berlioz’s score and orchestration, if not the back-story of the composition. The orchestra musicians have more to say, more pertinently, about the Ives and especially the Shostakovich symphonies. Russian-born members of the orchestra speak quite movingly about the shadow that Stalin and his henchmen cast over Shostakovich and Soviet society, although none appears to be old enough to remember the dictator, who died in 1953.

The Ives episode presents the most challenging music – this composer’s orchestral traffic was never heavier than in the "Holidays" Symphony – and yet the most accessible story, at least for American viewers. MTT emphasizes Ives’ fixation with New England’s landscape (lovingly pictured by the camera crew) and society in the post-Civil War era in which he grew up, and the radical changes the country went through as it became an urban, industrial power in the early 20th century. While this work is a sound picture of the 19th-century rural America of Ives’ childhood, its energy level and frequent overloads of stimuli – it may be the musical embodiment of "too much information" – are as modern as a big-city streetcorner.

The Shostakovich episode leans more heavily on historical film footage (of Shostakovich, Stalin and the mid-20th century Soviet Union); and, unlike the Berlioz and Ives programs, features Tilson Thomas speaking to a San Francisco Symphony audience during a performance at Davies Symphony Hall. This program also deals more extensively with historical-social background and relatively less so with musical explication – although, as with the Berlioz and Ives, MTT explains in some detail the coded signals within Shostakovich’s score.

The first episode of Michael Tilson Thomas’ "Keeping Score," exploring Berlioz’s "Symphonie fantastique," airs at 10 p.m. Oct. 15 on WCVE (Channel 23 [HD1]). The series continues with programs on Ives’ "Holidays" Symphony on Oct. 22 and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 on Oct. 29, both at 10 p.m.

POSTSCRIPT: This series is a timely reminder that Dudamania in LA is not the only thing that classical music in California has going for it.