`Keeping Score' shows the human interest in classical music

"Music," says conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, "offers an unflinching look at life as it is, not just the cool parts, but also the depressing parts and the un-understandable parts. This is how life feels."

This week Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony illustrate the point through Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony and with the launch of what could turn out to be the most ambitious classical-music-in-the-media project since Leonard Bernstein's beloved concerts for young people with the New York Philharmonic.

"Keeping Score: MTT on Music" is addressed to the audience of 2004 and its expectations. The Bernstein programs were telecast live; the producers pointed the camera at the conductor, and he talked. "Keeping Score," which coincidentally appears 50 years after Bernstein's first television program on music, for "Omnibus" in 1954, is the result of weeks of shooting and months of editing; it is sleek, slick, fast-moving, entertaining -- and informative.

The two initial one-hour television programs are supplemented by an interactive website (www.keepingscore.org), a radio series expected to launch next summer, and an ambitious educational and outreach program aimed at high schools in 2005.

"Keeping Score" approaches Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, rehearsals and performance, as a human-interest story in two consecutive hourlong parts that air on PBS's "Great Performances" Wednesday (WGBH, Channel 2, beginning at 9:30 p.m.).

The first hour, "The Making of a Performance," is a documentary naturally focusing chiefly on the conductor -- what he thinks about the music, what he wants to achieve in a performance. At 59, Tilson Thomas is still youthful in demeanor and attitude; the descendant of generations of theater people, he's a born communicator. We see him driving through the urban landscape of San Francisco in a Volvo, watching kids playing clapping games, listening to bells from churches, observing birds lined up on telephone lines like notes on a musical stave. Alarmingly his head occasionally turns from the road to the camera as he explains that the sounds of living are the "primal moves" or the raw materials of music.

We visit him in his home and see him studying the score, singing it, playing it through on the piano; we see him in his office at the concert hall, rehearsing with individual members of the orchestra. We join him in throwing a stick for his dog to retrieve in a park with a spectacular view of the Golden Gate Bridge; it is interesting to watch him warm up for a concert by sitting at a piano backstage and playing a Mozart sonata.

We watch him working with the full orchestra. "The usual way to play [the first movement] is to bash the hell out of it," he says. "Let's do something noble, lyrical, Italianate." He is very amusing as he describes the "lonely, depressed, alienated" aspects of the music and asks for a phrase to be played like a moan or a sigh: "Why me?" he whines. And we see bits of the actual performance; when he steams offstage after the finale, he says, "That was definitely in the pocket."

In other segments, Tilson Thomas is deceptively casual and immensely articulate -- he set down written guidelines for himself, but he spoke spontaneously, and it shows. He presents a stiff, posed photograph of Tchaikovsky looking like a banker to the camera, then speaks of the turbulence of the composer's inner life at the time he was composing the piece; his courtship and brief, disastrous marriage. "He's gay and he can't hide it anymore; his soul is in a very far-off region and he's an outcast," Tilson Thomas explains.

We explore some of the technical issues involved in an orchestral concert, things the audience never thinks about, like the librarian's marking Tilson Thomas's bowings and expressive directions onto the individual pages of music. We meet several members of the orchestra and learn what this symphony means to them as individuals -- "musical memory is like a smell," one of the Russian musicians says, speaking of his native land.

We share their rituals of preparation, which are also full of human interest -- in the locker room, we see the tympanist soaking the animal skins from Ireland that become his drumheads. We watch the charismatic oboist making a reed with curious contraptions that look like medieval devices of torture. We learn to share the piccolo player's alarm at her exposed solo in the third movement -- her first appearance in the symphony. "Only 21 notes -- how bad could it be?" she reflects. "It's bad because you have to do it all in three seconds."

There are also a couple of surreal California touches; a flute player has purple-black fingernails and speaks of "channeling" the great composers.

Old timers may miss Bernstein's unrivaled ability to imbue analysis of musical process and of structure with human interest, but Bernstein's target audience was not visually educated by MTV or by reality shows. Nevertheless, music is what holds "Keeping Score" together. Through the stages of preparation, we hear Tchaikovsky's principal phrases sung and played on the piano, by individual instruments, and by the whole orchestra, sometimes superimposed on one another; the themes sink in and become part of our experience. Like Bernstein, Tilson Thomas can illustrate musical points at the keyboard, and his eyes are fiery with emotion. He's particularly good on the dizzying interactions of the scherzo and on the "out-of-control march" of the finale.

The second show, "In Performance," presents the Tchaikovsky symphony complete, briefly introduced by Tilson Thomas wearing a leather jacket and paying tribute to the role the energy and focus of the audience play in the complete concert experience. The performance is white-hot, passionate, and it is fun to see some of the players we have previously met working onstage -- a pleasure that subscribers enjoy with their hometown orchestras. Our piccolo player smiles in triumph after nailing her solo.

TV director Gary Halvorson contributes some nice touches -- Tilson Thomas and the tympanist locking eyes as they generate the fury of the finale of the first movement, for example, followed by a triumphant salute from the conductor. Superimpositions help chart the intricacies of the pizzicatos of the scherzos. But basically Halvorson hasn't added much to the visual vocabulary of orchestras on television developed by Jordan Whitelaw for the Boston Symphony Orchestra's "Evening at Symphony" decades ago, and he hasn't solved the problem of making a concert visually exciting -- and of making what we see relevant to what we hear. The mind wanders -- and wonders what that guy who looks like Scott Peterson is doing sitting in the trumpet section.

Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony have ambitious $20 million plans for the future of the "Keeping Score" project after this pilot episode, which was taped in 2002; the cost of the pilot episode was somewhere between $2 and $3 million. According to executive director Brent Assink, the hope is to produce a three-year television series of three programs each, along with the radio and Internet dimensions.

"What will happen in the future will hinge on what we have learned from the pilot," he says, "and of course it is contingent on our ability to continue to raise money for it." So far the orchestra has raised about a quarter of the total budget from a diverse constituency, including a local foundation, the Werner and Evelyn Haas Jr. Fund; the National Endowment for the Arts; and local donor Nan McEvoy.

"Keeping Score" marks an impressive first step; it conveys what Tilson Thomas calls the "enormous testimony" of Tchaikovsky's symphony.