Remembering conductor, composer and pianist Michael Tilson Thomas

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DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli. Michael Tilson Thomas, the composer and conductor who presided over the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra for 25 years, died last week at age 81. He had battled brain cancer since 2022. The musical and social impact of Tilson Thomas ranged far beyond the podium. As an educator, he co-founded the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, a place for musicians to launch their careers. He composed and performed original works. As a TV host on PBS, he presented a 10-part multiyear series about classical music, as well as a two-hour special about his own grandparents. And by being open in San Francisco about his half-century private relationship with his life partner, Tilson Thomas was an early and influential figure in the gay rights movement.

Michael Tilson Thomas was born in Los Angeles in 1944 into an artistic family that stretched back for generations. His paternal grandparents, Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, as both stars and organizers of a national road company, helped establish the American Yiddish theater. In 2012, Tilson Thomas celebrated them in a "Great Performances" TV special called "The Thomashefskys." Their son Tony (ph), Tilson Thomas' father, also was in show business. He was a producer of the classic Orson Welles radio show "Mercury Theatre On The Air," and later, for television, wrote for such programs as "Death Valley Days" and "Lassie."

Michael Tilson Thomas gravitated to television, as well. In 2000, five years after joining the San Francisco Symphony and establishing himself as a world-class conductor, he was interviewed by Morley Safer on "60 Minutes," who asked him how he saw his job as a conductor.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "60 MINUTES")

MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS: In my mind, the conductor is much more like a director in the theater. It's very clear to me, perhaps because of my family, that the musicians are the ones who are actually doing the playing. And I am there to help them focus and clarify what they need to do so that they appear to their very best and feel that freedom and confidence to be their very best. Because in the process of playing these thousands of notes - and there are thousands of notes they're playing in every performance - they need sometimes help to say, ah, here, make more space for your colleagues over here. Be more aggressive about this. Don't be afraid to take the risk to be even quieter here. The way a director would help the actors to clarify their ensemble.

BIANCULLI: Four years later, in 2004, Michael Tilson Thomas had enough visibility and clout to mount his own music appreciation TV series on PBS, as Leonard Bernstein had done before him. Tilson Thomas' series was called "Keeping Score." It presented 10 installments over seven years, introducing classical works to TV viewers in a very personal and informal manner.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "KEEPING SCORE")

TILSON THOMAS: This is Beethoven's third symphony, the one he called "Eroica." It took Beethoven three years to write this piece. And it's taken me nearly 30 years to get my head round it and understand it, feel comfortable with it. This score is a messy record of all the questions I asked and the answers I searched for. And time and again along this journey, I asked myself, why is this taking me so long? Well, part of it, of course, is it's by Beethoven. And anytime you do a piece by Beethoven, you feel this big weight on your shoulders. The guy is so great and so famous. He's not just a composer. He's a brand. He's an icon. He's an industry. How famous is Beethoven? Even Chuck Berry knows who he is...

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ROLL OVER BEETHOVEN")

CHUCK BERRY: (Singing) Roll over, Beethoven. Tell Tchaikovsky the news.

TILSON THOMAS: ...Which is pretty good for a guy who lived 200 years ago and never even had a gold record.

BIANCULLI: After discussing the history and impact of each piece, he then conducted his San Francisco orchestra in a passionate performance, as here with "Eroica."

(SOUNDBITE OF SAN FRANCISCO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA PERFORMANCE OF BEETHOVEN'S "EROICA")

BIANCULLI: Michael Tilson Thomas also was a composer. Perhaps his most meaningful composition was a combination orchestral piece and recitation called "From The Diary Of Anne Frank." He wrote it for Audrey Hepburn, who, like Anne Frank, was born in Holland in 1929. While Anne Frank was in hiding, young Hepburn was aiding the Dutch resistance. She survived. Anne Frank did not, but her diary did. Hepburn went to Hollywood, became a star and was asked to play Anne Frank in a 1959 movie. She declined, feeling it was all too close and personal. But when Michael Tilson Thomas wrote a piece with Audrey Hepburn as his muse, she agreed to read Anne Frank's words as the orchestra played Tilson Thomas' stirring music. In this passage from a 1990 performance in Oslo conducted by Lukas Foss, you can hear the musical equivalents of Nazi jackboots and later of hope. And of course, you also can hear Audrey Hepburn reading the words of young Anne Frank.

(SOUNDBITE OF PERFORMANCE OF MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS' "FROM THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK")

AUDREY HEPBURN: (Reading) It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery and death. I see the world being turned into a wilderness. I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us, too. I can feel the suffering of millions. And yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think it will all come right that this cruelty will end and that peace and tranquility will return again.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

BIANCULLI: Today on FRESH AIR, we're going to remember Michael Tilson Thomas by listening back to two of his conversations with Terry Gross. The first took part in 1995, the year he took the job as conductor in San Francisco.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)

TERRY GROSS: As a teenager, you participated in the premiere of works by Boulez, Stockhausen, Copland, Stravinsky. You worked with them directly, yes?

TILSON THOMAS: Yes, indeed.

GROSS: Yeah. So did they give you a sense of what to expect, you know, if you lived the life of a musician?

TILSON THOMAS: Well, they did. Many people did - I mean, also Copland. But I very early perceived that there were some people in the music business who had been playing music for their whole lives, who seemed to be ennobled and transfigured nearly by the process of making music and others who seemed to be very unhappy and embittered by the experience of making music. And so I was trying from the very beginning to understand what was the difference between these people and where did the choice lie between having a life in music that made you very, very happy or one that made you very frustrated.

GROSS: What were you able to figure out?

TILSON THOMAS: Well, I decided way back then that it was important for musicians to kind of take a musical Hippocratic oath before they went into the profession.

GROSS: (Laughter) And what is the oath?

TILSON THOMAS: That you have to discover that it's just necessary for you to make music. I mean, to be a musician, you have to love music as much as eating or sleeping or dreaming or all those other ings. And you can't be sure when you enter the profession of music where it may take you. It is uncertain. It depends a lot on being very well prepared and being in the right place at the right time.

But I remember a moment when I was around 18 or 19 and I was walking on the USC campus, where I was going to school, and I thought to myself, well, I know that I'm good enough - I know I'm good enough I could be a university musician. And there are wonderful things happening at this music school of great quality and expression, and if I could do this as long as I can make music, I'll be very happy. And if it turns out that I can make music in some larger arena, well, we'll see about that.

But I know that it's music itself, which is this process, this dialogue with something in my spirit that I must pursue. And then I knew I was going into music with no other agenda. It was just the music itself that mattered. And it was those people who - for whom music truly mattered who were the ones that had wonderful lives as musicians.

GROSS: When you said you thought musicians should take a Hippocratic oath, I thought it would be, you know, first do no harm...

TILSON THOMAS: (Laughter).

GROSS: ...And that it would be something like, never perform boring works.

TILSON THOMAS: Well, never perform with your heart not being in it. Never allow yourself to get to the point where it's a job. Always make sure that your spirit is focused so that communicating music to other people is a central priority for you.

GROSS: I have a conducting question - I mean, a stick question. You studied, you know, classical stick technique. How much of that do you use now, and how much of your technique is based on what you've, like, learned and improvised over the years?

TILSON THOMAS: It's definitely a mixture of both. I think the easiest way for you to understand this is that there's a constant give-and-take process going on in the rehearsals and in the performance itself. So there's certain key moments where I have to really indicate the exact ictus of a certain moment in time to get around a particular corner. And then having done that, then I - what I want to do is sort of turn over the lead of the music to perhaps a solo oboe player or perhaps the viola section or maybe a brass chorale. All those different groups within the orchestra have their own reaction time. They all take breaths at a different speed. They all have a different way of interacting. And it's possible with my baton or with a little bit of body language or in using my eyes a lot, mostly, and using my facial expression, my contact with the orchestra shapes all those things.

GROSS: You were very close to Leonard Bernstein. Do you feel like you learned a lot about conducting technique from him?

TILSON THOMAS: Of course, I learned a lot from him by observing him and mostly through the kind of colloquy concerning music that we had over many years. When I was studying pieces, I had the opportunity to, you know, call him up and ask questions. And I - in the best kind of a rabbinic style, almost always when I asked him a question, he would ask me a question back, and by this kind of dialogue of questions, I - you know, he would help me to really find my own way of doing the music. And that was, of course, terrific.

And I guess my conducting style has become a lot freer. It's a lot more economical now, maybe, than it was 10 years ago. But, you know, these things change. I can only say that now it feels to me, in the repertoire that's really mine, that as if I'm making the music happen in space, as if I'm touching the notes and actually molding them and shaping them in some kind of plastic way, you know, within time itself.

GROSS: You were on the road with James Brown once, right?

TILSON THOMAS: Well, I was with him for a couple of days. I met him in Boston. He was doing a little - he was doing a show in a small jazz club. And I told him I was a great admirer of his, and he said, well, come on the road. You know, see how we do it. Because I asked him how he got the band to be so tight. And this is the time when he was doing - "Sex Machine" was his big hit. And I spent three or four days with him in Atlanta, in Augusta and in Washington, D.C., watching from backstage just what he did, and it was a great thrill.

GROSS: So did you learn anything you could apply?

TILSON THOMAS: Absolutely because what - I realized that he was focused on the exact duration of the perceivable present. In every particular piece, the stroke of the beat had a certain length. He wanted the trap drummer to be out in front and the hand drummer to be in the back and the bass player to be right in the center, and he had an exact idea of how wide in time that stroke of the (vocalizing) would be, and he used it. And it was something very sophisticated and just the kind of thing that composers like Igor Stravinsky thought about a great deal.

GROSS: So did it change the way you conducted at all or the way you organized your beat?

TILSON THOMAS: It didn't change the way I conducted so much, but it changed the way I could listen to music and imagine how the ictus, the exact moment of the attack in music, could be really artfully crafted to propel the music in different ways.

BIANCULLI: Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, speaking to Terry Gross in 1995. He died last week at the age of 81. We'll hear more of their conversation after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 1995 interview with Michael Tilson Thomas, the longtime conductor of the San Francisco Symphony. He died last week at the age of 81.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)

GROSS: Your grandparents were stars of the Yiddish theater, Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky. And they - well, I think your grandfather died just a few years before you were born.

TILSON THOMAS: Correct.

GROSS: In - what? - '38 or '39?

TILSON THOMAS: Right.

GROSS: And you say - what? - 30,000 people attended his funeral?

TILSON THOMAS: That's correct. That's...

GROSS: That's extraordinary.

TILSON THOMAS: I found that out - I never realized that until just recently, I found the old New York Times piece on his funeral, and there were the pictures of Second Avenue closed off totally and this huge parade of people going out to the cemetery in Brooklyn, where he was buried.

GROSS: Did you grow up thinking that you literally had show business in your blood?

TILSON THOMAS: Oh, I absolutely knew that, especially because I grew up around my grandmother, Bessie Thomashefsky, Boris' wife - who some people say was a greater star than even he. She was a tremendous actress, a natural talent. She had gone on the stage for the first time when she was about 13-and-a-half years-old. And she became a huge headline first as a tragic actress - and then in her mid-40s, she converted her career into being a major comedian.

And she created a number of characters on the stage - one very famous one "Minka The Dinstmoyd," "Minka The Housemaid" - which was a kind of Yiddishkeit Pygmalion story. And in this play and others, she created that character that Fanny Bryce and Molly Pecan and even Barbara Streisand are still playing to this day - that kind of wry, wise, Americanized Jewish woman who has lots of personality and lots of mischief behind their enormous wisdom.

GROSS: So did she teach you anything about singing or acting when you were growing up?

TILSON THOMAS: Well, lots of things. I mean, she told me the history of the theater in enormous detail, and she recited scenes from it. And when I was a very young kid, she took me onto the stage of the Pasadena Playhouse, and we were standing on the stage, and she said, I must have been 3 or 4 at this time. She said, Look up, Mikha'el, look up, and look up. What do you see far, far away? And I said, well, I see lights, and she says, look further up and said, far - way up there. You see that light up there? It says, exit. I said, oh, yeah, that's very far away. She said, well, up there, that's the second balcony or the gallery. And up there are the cheapest seats, and in those seats sit the people who love the show the most. And it's correct.

GROSS: That's interesting, yeah.

TILSON THOMAS: She said, and whatever you're doing on stage - if you're whispering, if you're singing, if you're, you know, soliloquizing, whatever you're doing - you must remember that it must reach those people. The intent of what you're doing must reach those people. You must be generous to reach your whole audience. So things like that were very valuable advice, of course.

BIANCULLI: Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. He spoke to Terry Gross again in 2012, when he had written and appeared in a PBS Great Performances special honoring his grandparents, Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, who were prominent stars of the Yiddish theater.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)

GROSS: Michael Tilson Thomas, welcome back to FRESH AIR.

TILSON THOMAS: Thank you. Pleasure.

GROSS: The role of the Yiddish theater was very important for Jewish immigrants to the United States - many of whom spoke only Yiddish - and so they couldn't read the regular newspapers. A lot of the English language theater would not have literal meaning to them because they wouldn't understand the language. So the Yiddish stage, I mean, that was a really important - particularly in New York, a really important place for gathering and for doing anything cultural.

TILSON THOMAS: Well, absolutely. Of course, there were very many Yiddish newspapers in New York and Philadelphia and Chicago and all these major cities at that time. But for the audience to go to the theater to experience a show - especially a show which was very often in my grandfather's case, a kind of spectacle - gave them a sense of the importance, the sheer scale of what was achievable by an immigrant in the United States. It inspired them. Old ladies used to have - come up to me on the street and said, we were kids. We had nothing - but once a week or once a month, we went to the theater, and we saw the red velvet curtains with the name Thomashefsky in large gold letters. And we thought, if that's possible for him to do...

GROSS: (Laughter).

TILSON THOMAS: ...Then it's possible for us to do.

BIANCULLI: Conductor, composer and pianist, Michael Tilson Thomas, talking with Terry Gross in 2012. He died last week at the age of 81. We'll hear more of this interview after a break. And John Powers reviews the new "Devil Wears Prada" movie. I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. I'm TV critic David Bianculli. Today, we're remembering conductor, composer and pianist Michael Tilson Thomas, who died last week at the age of 81. He was the longtime music director of the San Francisco Symphony. He also founded the New World Symphony for young players and conducted most of the World's major ensembles. He also made over 120 recordings with major orchestras and earned 12 Grammy Awards. When we left off, he was talking about his grandparents, Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, who were beloved stars of the Yiddish theater.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)

GROSS: The name Thomashefsky is such a famous name in the world of theater and in the world of Yiddish theater. I grew up knowing that name. I knew that they were - Thomashefskys were famous performers on the Yiddish stage, but that's about all I knew. Your last name is Thomas, which is an abbreviated version of Thomashefsky. How did Thomashefsky become Thomas?

TILSON THOMAS: It really started with my father, who was trying to make his own way in life in the theater. And he simply was unable to do that. Everywhere that he went, he would mention his last name, and right away, it was, oh, you're Boris Thomashefsky's son. And therefore - he didn't want that. He just wanted to be able to find his own way in life and in the theater, so he was the one who changed his name initially to Ted Thomas.

And quite frankly, he also wanted to escape from that whole crazed celebrity situation, which my grandparents inspired. And I think he also wanted to protect me from that because there were crazed fans, is the only way of describing. There were stalker kinds of people who were pursuing my grandparents and their children, and with the same kind of ardor that we're accustomed to thinking of crazy paparazzi or fans pursuing stars today.

GROSS: Were you aware of that when you were growing up? Your grandfather was dead, but your grandmother lived until you were 16 or 17. And she lived nearby, and I think you were pretty close to her. Did you get a sense of people stalking her? Or was it, like, way too late for that 'cause she was already in her 70s?

TILSON THOMAS: Well, she had also moved out to LA. And one of the reasons for doing that, outside of getting some character parts in movies she hoped for, was that she wanted to get away from the whole scene in New York - a town, as she said, with too many ghosts. But when I really became aware of the shadow of Boris for the first time was when I went back east when I was perhaps 11 or 12. And I was going to a lot of shows. I had stage manager cousins of mine 'cause so many members of the family were still in the business, in show business, not necessarily as actors onstage, but in everything having to do with the behind-the-scenes life.

And we used to go to just one scene in every play. So theater people, they'd say, oh, kid, the good scene to see - the Lunts' Act 2 finale is good. Eddie Foy's joke in the second scene of the first act is good - you know, so that kind of stuff. But there was this one show, "My Fair Lady," and everybody was talking about it, and I thought I'd like to see it. My mother said, don't ask Cousin Georgie (ph) to get you into that show. It's the hardest ticket to get, and just don't be a monster.

So, of course, when I saw him, I immediately said, could we see "My Fair Lady"? We went to the theater. People were lined up around the block to hopefully get some returns. And he went over to the stage door, knocked and said, hey, is Izzy (ph) around? And Izzy, company manager, came out. And my cousin indicated me and said, hey, Izzy, see this kid? Boris Thomashefsky's grandson. Two minutes later, we were in Row 5, right in the center of that theater.

GROSS: Although your grandfather died before you were born, you got to know your grandmother, Bessie Thomashefsky, pretty well. And tell us about the kind of parts that she played in the Yiddish theater.

TILSON THOMAS: Bessie started out as a young girl. She was about 5 when she arrived into the United States from the Ukraine. And she met Boris, kind of eloped with him when she was a young teenager and 14, 15 years old. And she began finding her way in the theater, first playing kind of innocent young girl roles.

But as time went on, she'd also discovered her enormous abilities as a comedian. And she very often played trouser parts or parts involving women being disguised as men for particular political or educational social purposes, a little bit like what the story of "Yentl" is, right? So Bessie did a lot of plays like that, where a woman disguises herself as a man in order to gain the advantages of education or whatever that a man can have.

GROSS: What did she tell you about women's rights and the disparities facing women when she was young?

TILSON THOMAS: Well, she went from being a little girl in a village that was asked to bring in the goats and do other domestic chores to working in a tobacco factory in Baltimore and then suddenly finding herself onstage as a star pretty quickly. But she went beyond that. She wanted to know everything about the structure of the theater. And she became a very effective producer and manager and someone who paid far more attention to the whole business and organization aspect of the theater than my grandfather did, who was the kind of big dreamer and partier.

And that was so unusual for a woman of those days. I have some correspondence of hers where she's writing to some people who put into an ad in some big paper that she was going to be a part of some season they were doing. And she writes to them saying that she absolutely has not agreed to do this, and these are the conditions which they must immediately fulfill in order for this to happen. It's really very tough and straight talk. And there's a lot of stuff about her I didn't have room for in the show, remarkable things, like when she was arrested by Theodore Roosevelt.

This happened in this way. In New York, there were blue laws at the time, meaning that performances were forbidden on Sunday. But, of course, in the Yiddish theater, Sunday was a very big day because Saturday was the Sabbath. So they played on Sunday. And at one point, when T.R. was police commissioner of New York, he and some of his men raided one of the Thomashefsky theaters. And he came in. He saw Bessie, who was very young and who looked much younger than she was always. And he said, look out, little girl. And she said, little girl, my a**. I'm the star here. If anybody's being taken in, it's me.

GROSS: (Laughter) That's so funny. So she got arrested?

TILSON THOMAS: She did. That's exactly the way she told me the story, little...

GROSS: Like she insisted on getting arrested (laughter).

TILSON THOMAS: Yeah. She was going to be in the center of it. And, I mean, women's rights, feminism was a very big part of the Yiddish theater, but along with a lot of other social issues. The Yiddish theater plays even the so-called shunds, sort of low, everyday plays, were about issues like women's rights, like about labor - capital and labor, child labor - about degrees of religious observance, about the whole issue of assimilation, about reproductive rights of women and also a lot about the language. Are we going to speak Yiddish? Are we going to speak English? What language at home? What language in the rest of the world?

And what about the much larger issue, which is how can it be that somebody who was such a big shot in the old country became a nobody in America, and some little schlemiel from nowhere in a tiny village has suddenly, in the United States, become such a macher, such a big shot? And what does an immigrant pool of people do to understand where now is honor? Where is tradition?

BIANCULLI: Composer, conductor and musician Michael Tilson Thomas speaking with Terry Gross in 2012. He died last week. We'll hear more of this interview after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 2012 interview with conductor and composer Michael Tilson Thomas. He died last week at the age of 81. When we left off, he was talking about his grandparents who were stars of the Yiddish theater.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)

GROSS: So, I want to play a recording by your grandmother, the late Bessie Thomashefsky, singing a song, and I'm going to have you introduce it. This is actually from a DVD outtake from your show. So, tell us about this song and when you think it was recorded.

TILSON THOMAS: This is a little introduction to a song called Minka's song, "Minka's Monologue," one of Bessie's most famous parts in which she's playing a girl from a little village who's come to the United States and is on the eve of a huge adventure, a "Pygmalion"-like experiment in which she will be elevated from her lowly parlor maid status to being the lady of the house.

GROSS: OK. So this is Bessie Thomashefsky recorded approximately when?

TILSON THOMAS: 1920-something.

GROSS: Wow. OK. Here we go.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

BESSIE THOMASHEFSKY: (Singing in Yiddish).

GROSS: So that was the late Bessie Thomashefsky singing in Yiddish, and she and Boris Thomashefsky are the late grandparents of my guest, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.

So, what kind of music did your grandmother introduce you to?

TILSON THOMAS: I was lucky enough to hear her deliver a lot of her biggest numbers right there in our living room, since she would arrive every weekend to our house, and we would put on a little show together in which I would accompany her in some of her songs, and she would do recitations, and we did little scenes together. So although it was my parents' fondest hope that I would become some kind of scientist or mathematician, I realized that she was already getting me into the whole theater experience right there at home.

GROSS: That's really interesting. You know, one of the things she says - one of the things you describe her having said to you when you were young is, you're more like me than your parents are. They're more conventional, and you have more of a - what'd she say? - like, a creative spirit or something.

TILSON THOMAS: Yeah. She said, your parents are very lovely people, but terribly conventional. You're like me. You're an adventurer. You'll have to prove something.

GROSS: Did you take that to heart?

TILSON THOMAS: I paid attention to it. I didn't know quite what it meant. And as I listened to her tell all these stories of her life from her childhood through her stardom and then even her reflections on the way fashions changed and the way she was in her late life, a quite lonely person, I took it all in. And what I kind of understood from her was that it had been a very interesting ride, that she really was proud of what had been accomplished. And when she saw somebody, a very successful entertainer, coming up, and she could see in them something that had come from the kind of things that they had done in the theater, she was very proud of it. She recognized them and appreciated them.

GROSS: So when your grandmother died and you were, I don't know, 16 or 17, was there music at her funeral?

TILSON THOMAS: There wasn't much music at my grandmother's funeral. There were a few prayers, and there were very few people there, and her plaque just says, Bessie Thomashefsky, Yiddish theater pioneer star, which is exactly what she wanted it to say. But, of course, there's a whole repertory of songs that we played at home all the time whenever we thought about her and that I still play. It was a big moment, a big rite of passage in my life, the first day that I took over playing her songs instead of my father playing them and measuring the way I was playing them against the wonderful nuances that he and my grandmother had brought to the music. I was lucky to hear my family play that music for me. I wanted to keep in my ears exactly the way they had sung the songs and played them with all the irony and mordancy and snappy little gestures and comebacks.

GROSS: So you mentioned some advice in your show that your grandmother gave you about when you're on stage, you have to remember that the people in the uppermost balcony are the people who paid the least but are enjoying it the most, and you have to - even if you're whispering, you have to make sure that those people can hear you. How has that affected you as a conductor?

TILSON THOMAS: My way of expressing what she said to me is what is it like for people beyond the sixth row? That - we play in such big halls sometimes in classical music, and their hall is designed to be very rich, which is, on the one hand, very nice, the gorgeous sound that's there. But to get the sound to be distinct is difficult. And I sometimes tell my students that playing classical music is like making an announcement in an airport that you hear someone say, passengers on flight 391, (imitating muffled announcement)...

GROSS: (Laughter).

TILSON THOMAS: ...Immediately, please.

GROSS: (Laughter).

TILSON THOMAS: So you're trying to make every single moment completely distinct. Another way Bessie had of saying that, she said, (impersonating Yiddish accent) listen, when you're doing an accent, you got to watch out for the ninth word. It's the ninth word that's dangerous, 'cause you're saying, (impersonating British accent) I was going to the park one day, and I noticed the (impersonating Yiddish accent) most beautiful...

GROSS: (Laughter).

TILSON THOMAS: Suddenly, you know, around that, you'll suddenly drop the accent. You'll drop it. You got to keep the contour of it all the way going through. Same thing in music.

GROSS: That's really great. Michael Tilson Thomas, thank you. It's been great.

TILSON THOMAS: As always, thank you.

BIANCULLI: Michael Tilson Thomas speaking to Terry Gross in 2012. The longtime conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, who conducted more than 120 classical music recordings with major orchestras, died last week at age 81. Here's a sample of one of those recordings from very early in his career. In 1976, Michael Tilson Thomas conducted the Columbia Jazz Band in a recording of George Gershwin's "Rhapsody In Blue." Tilson Thomas relied on the original orchestrations when the piece first was performed in 1924 and on Gershwin's 1925 piano roll recording to present an authentic recreation of the work - a version that was both historically significant and widely praised.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE COLUMBIA JAZZ BAND PERFORMANCE OF GEORGE GERSHWIN'S "RHAPSODY IN BLUE")

BIANCULLI: Coming up, critic-at-large John Powers reviews "The Devil Wears Prada 2." This is FRESH AIR.

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. "The Devil Wears Prada 2," which opens wide today, is a sequel to the 2006 hit about an idealistic young journalist, played by Anne Hathaway, who becomes the assistant to a scary, dictatorial fashion magazine editor, played by Meryl Streep. Both reprise their roles in this new film, as do Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci. It finds the magazine world in a vastly different place than it was 20 years ago. Our critic-at-large, John Powers, says the film, if not quite as much a lark as the original, is still good fun and has more to say.

JOHN POWERS, BYLINE: When "The Devil Wears Prada" hit theaters in 2006, I was the film critic at Vogue, the model for Runway, the fashion magazine in the story. The inspiration for Meryl Streep's icy editor, Miranda Priestly, was my own boss, the legendary Anna Wintour. I didn't do a review because, no matter what I said about the movie, which I found slight but entertaining, people wouldn't have trusted. Now comes the long-awaited the "The Devil Wears Prada 2." And I'm free to say that David Frankel's film should delight fans of the first one.

Cleverly written by Aline Brosh McKenna, this fizzy sequel boasts the same expert cast, all as good as you'd hope, not to mention the same ravishing outfits and sumptuous hotel suites. But as the action moves glossily from Manhattan high-rises to New England mansions to Lady Gaga singing in a Milanese museum, it has more on its mind than the original. The story is set 20 years later in the present day.

Anne Hathaway is back as smiley, wholesome Andy Sachs, who's risen from being Miranda's beleaguered assistant to become a prize-winning reporter of hard news stories. Then she gets laid off from her paper. Luckily, there's been a scandal over a foolish article in Runway. And in a damage-control move, the owner hires the respected Andy to be the magazine's features editor. She's back where she started. Only this time she winds up trying to save the publication, she once thought her personal hell.

Like any good sequel, the movie feels like a reunion. The elegant silver-haired Miranda - Streep is impeccable - greets Andy's arrival with trademark imperiousness. Andy's mentor, the art director, Nigel Kipling, is still there, too, to dress her and guide her and, in Stanley Tucci's lovely performance, be quietly touching. Emily Blunt's scheming character, Emily Charlton, who was once Andy's sharp-elbowed rival, has left Runway for a big job at Dior's New York outpost and is romantically involved with Benji Barnes - that's Justin Theroux - a dorky, smug Jeff Bezos figure with a wise, philanthropic ex-wife played by Lucy Liu. Here, early on, Andy, Nigel and Miranda go to the Dior offices. Andy explains her new role to a shocked Emily.

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ANNE HATHAWAY: (As Andy Sachs) I am the new features editor at Runway.

EMILY BLUNT: (As Emily Charlton) No, you're not. Are you serious? Wow. Wonders never cease.

HATHAWAY: (As Andy Sachs) No. I'm actually a journalist now. I've been published in - it doesn't matter. Anyway, we are all well aware that running that story was a mistake and are taking immediate steps.

BLUNT: (As Emily Charlton) I cannot actually get over this. It's really remarkable - a senior editor at Runway. You?

HATHAWAY: (As Andy Sachs) Yep.

MERYL STREEP: (As Miranda Priestly) We're all so thrilled.

POWERS: Now, the first "Devil Wears Prada," with its masterpiece of a title, was a pop fable about wealth and glamour. It had the mythic pull of a hero's journey. Andy travels through Hades - in this case, the fashion world - and faces down the monstrous Miranda, whose unashamed meanness tickled the audience. In fact, the world has changed hugely since the original, and the movie reflects it. This new story is less mythological than historical, less concerned with its heroine's personal journey - Andy's meet-cute romance here is a big yawn - than with what's happening in the larger society, where the digital age has crushed magazines and newspapers.

Back in 2006, Runway, like Vogue, was a juggernaut, with lavish expenditures and a September issue the size of a bank vault. Now with econo budgets and issues as thin as its models, the magazine is struggling to survive. Its major presence is online and ripe for gobbling. The movie accurately depicts how the print world has been falling into the hands of finance thugs, gibberish-spouting consultants and tech moguls, like Benji, who treat publishing as a personal plaything. Driven by algorithms and prophets, none of them actually cares about good journalism.

Andy does, which is why she fights to keep Runway afloat. She knows it's imperfect and often shallow, yet it's still better than the new guys will make it. Plus, she needs the job. As for Miranda, she may be as ruthless as ever, but she's less intimidating than before, and not only because we saw her human side in the first film. She knows how shaky her position is in the new media landscape, where the sophisticated values she represents and institutions she leads are all being washed away in a tsunami of clicks. In "The Devil Wears Prada 2" the devil is not Miranda, but the moneymen, and they wear Prada, too.

BIANCULLI: John Powers reviewed the "The Devil Wears Prada 2," which opens in theaters today. On Monday's show, Booker Prize-winning novelist Douglas Stuart. Like the main character of his first two novels, Stuart grew up in Glasgow in the 1980s, working-class, queer and with an alcoholic mother. She died when he was a teen. He also went on to have a career in fashion in New York, which plays into his latest novel. I hope you can join us.

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BIANCULLI: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Sam Briger. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Herzfeld and and Charlie Cott. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli.

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