Program Description:
Featuring award-winning conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, KEEPING SCORE: REVOLUTIONS IN MUSIC is a ground-breaking documentary series that brings classical music to people of all ages and musical backgrounds. With episodes devoted to Beethoven, Stravinsky and Copland, the series explores what made the music of these great composers so revolutionary and why their works are still so powerful today.
Episode One: Beethoven's Eroica
Not every revolution overthrows a government—some overturn artistic convention. Beethoven's third Symphony, Eroica, defied accepted notions of music as decorative background for aristocratic amusement, and it forced the listener to confront the unconscious. In visits to refined Viennese drawing rooms and rustic Austro-Hungarian villages, Michael Tilson Thomas explores how Beethoven channeled his sorrow over the loss of his hearing, and his disappointment with Napoleon's imperial politics, to change the very definition of what a symphony could be.
Episode Two: Stravinsky's Rite of Spring
In 1913, with Europe on the brink of war, Igor Stravinsky produced a revolutionary event in music and dance at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. Known as The Rite of Spring, the ballet's primitive score sparked a riot in the audience that evening, and became one of the most influential musical statements of the 20th century. In this program, Michael Tilson Thomas and the musicians of the San Francisco Symphony take you from the salons of St. Petersburg to the villages where Stravinsky found inspiration in the earthy power of Russian folk music and dance. Thomas then retraces Stravinsky's journey to the cultural crossroads of pre-war Paris.
Episode Three: Copland and the American Sound
Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn in 1900. His artistic development spanned enormous transformation in the American experience—the fears of World War I and the Great Depression, the energy of the Jazz Age, the advent of modernism. And as the nation emerged as a world power, Copland wrote music that gave Americans a sense of their own identity and created a truly American sound.
Episode Four: MTT on Music - Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony
Michael Tilson Thomas delves into the notes and symbols that make up Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony, and unlocks the drama, pathos, elation and despair within. He also takes viewers behind the scenes to experience the preparation behind every performance—the solitary practice sessions, the group rehearsals, the efforts of each musician to grasp the composer's ultimate message.
Reviews
"[The Keeping Score programs] are, hands down, the best classical-music programs of their kind to be aired nationally in the U.S. since Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts. [Michael Tilson Thomas] is the finest American conductor of his generation, and the only one who learned the lessons of Leonard Bernstein, using them to turn the San Francisco Symphony into the most adventurous, audience-friendly orchestra in America."
— Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal
Keeping Score