1 Read about the documentary “Michael Tilson Thomas: Where Now Is,” which airs Friday.
Bay Area classical music lovers might be forgiven for imagining that we know Michael Tilson Thomas pretty well by this point. He spent 25 years as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, and he was a regular visitor with the orchestra during the decades before that; we’ve heard his best stories by now.
A new fulllength documentary based on his life and career, which is set to air on Friday, Oct. 23, as part of PBS’ “American Masters” series, doesn’t so much refute that idea as give it new complexity and depth.
Titled “Michael Tilson Thomas: Where Now Is” — an allusion to the passion for temporal specificity that he shares with the late James Brown — it takes the viewer on a genial, roundabout tour of Thomas’ history. It’s one of two backtoback offerings about Thomas and the Symphony coming to PBS, followed on Thursday, Oct. 29, by “Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony: S& M2,” a record of the collaboration that opened Chase Center last year.
The documentary tracks him from his sheltered upbringing in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, the only child of artsloving, leftwing parents, through his recent decades in San Francisco, Miami and London. Some of this is familiar but worth revisiting, including his transformation of the San Francisco Symphony ( full disclosure: one of the talking heads on this subject is mine) and the important impact that the New World Symphony — the Miami training orchestra he founded and still leads — has had on the classical music landscape.
But some of the midlife chapters are full of fresh material. There is wonderful footage of Thomas in his 20s and 30s, conducting and giving delightfully brash interviews as he eases into the main phase of his career.
Perhaps most winning of all is the emphasis on Thomas’ relationship with Joshua Robison, his husband and business partner. The story of how they met in junior high school, then reconnected years later to forge a life together, is impossible to resist.
Thomas himself is in a retrospective mood these days as well. At the couple’s home in Bolinas, where they’ve been sheltering since the onset of the COVID19 pandemic, Thomas is busy mining the materials of his younger years — journals, poems, musical sketches — for a planned musical theater work based on the artistic world of New York City in the 1970s and ’ 80s.
“I’m very happy with these pieces,” he told The Chronicle during a recent phone interview. “They paint very definite pictures — both humorously and nostalgically — of people I knew at the time, many of whom were on their way up into major careers.
“I’m enjoying the process of ... well, ‘ elegantizing’ I guess is the word. It’s very unusual to have a scene in a Broadway show that’s written in invertible counterpoint.”
One thing the “American Masters” documentary underscores is how important the educational mission of the New World Symphony is to Thomas. A new season there has already begun, and although the pandemic prevents concert performances, training of the young musicians is forging ahead online.
“I want the year to be productive for them,” Thomas said, “so basically I’m having a lot of office hours. I began by having halfhour oneonone calls with each of them individually, so now I know much more about them, where they are with their playing and where they want to be.”
He still feels sadness, he admitted, about having to part company with the Symphony so abruptly at the onset of the pandemic.
“I have flashbacks of thinking regretfully about all these wonderful pieces I was going to do with the orchestra, including so many that we did so often over the years,” he said. “When you’re all together reaffirming something that you’ve done and believe in, it’s a very positive and intimate experience. That’s what I really miss.”