"I feel, therefore I am." For Hector Berlioz, and for the Romantic Movement, those were more than words; they were a song of the heart. But with the unprecedented outpouring of emotion in his Symphonie fantastique Berlioz almost overpowered Paris. This orchestral sonic spectacular, written to win the heart of a beautiful actress, demanded sacrifice from its author and his audience. Join Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony as they follow Berlioz to the brink and beyond in this program.

 

 

Keeping Score: Ives’s Holidays Symphony

Ranging from tender sentiment to savage chaos, the music of early 20th-century composer Charles Ives explores an essentially American riddle: how can we survive the relentless assault of our own success? It was an enigma Ives embodied himself. He believed that we should all be brave enough to go it alone – yet he earned his living in insurance! In this Keeping Score program, Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony unwrap the layers of Ives’s Holidays Symphony to reveal a surprising musical portrait of New England.

Keeping Score: Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5

Shostakovich may have secreted a subversive cipher beneath the surface of his life-saving Symphony No. 5.. This is all the more shocking since another bad review from Stalin’s totalitarian forces could have meant a sentence to the Gulag or worse. This Keeping Score program investigates the arresting symphony that would either redeem Shostakovich or doom him. Did he dare hide a kernel of musical criticism in what appears to be a paean to the Motherland? Join Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony as they explore the hidden language of this masterwork.


Season One

Keeping Score: Stravinsky's Rite of Spring

In 1913, with Europe on the brink of war, a fashionable Parisian audience reacted with hostile frenzy to the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's new work, The Rite of Spring. In this DVD, 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 earthly power of Russian folk music and dance. Nearly a century after this wild rainforest of sound was performed, The Rite of Spring remains as exhilarating and liberating as music can be. MTT and the San Francisco Symphony show you why.


Keeping Score: Beethoven's Eroica

Not all revolutions are political. Some overturn artistic conventions. Beethoven's Eroica challenged accepted artistic notions of music as a kind of decorative background and brought the listener along on a gripping voyage into the unconscious. Retracing Beethoven's steps through Vienna's aristocratic ballrooms and Austria's rustic villages, MTT explores how Beethoven channeled hs fears of deafness, his admiration for Napoleon, and his obsession to prove himself the greatest composer of his time and to write a piece that forever changed what a symphony would be.


Keeping Score: Copland and the American Sound

Copland wrote classical music in his own special way. He transformed it to capture the energy of American's bustling cities and the vast quiet of its empty plains. He created a musical style that evoked the diversity of the American people. The sounds of Jewish music, African-American jazz, folk songs, cowboy ballads, and Latin American dances all played their parts in his compositions. Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony explore the music of Copland and the cityscapes, landscapes, and social and political developments that shaped it.


Keeping Score: Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony

In this DVD, MTT delves into the notes and symbols that make up Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony, and unlocks the drama, pathos, elation and despair within. Tchaikovsky's Fourth represents a watershed in the composer's symphonic evolution, as he brought the innermost secrets of his psyche to a genre traditionally associated with the logical development of musical ideas within established structural principles.

 

 

Full-length concert performances, on all discs, by the San Francisco Symphony in high-definition 16:9 widescreen and 5.1 surround sound.