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And there he is … finishing up lunch with a party of four, including his husband Joshua Robison.
9 at Carnegie Hall the previous night.
In any case, he seems content.
Being able to stay here has changed my perspective on the city, he says.
My all-time favorite hero is James Brown, he casually told theTimesthat year.
He sometimes flummoxed audiences, too.
Youre the man for me!
The excitement has barely faded.
Like most successful revolutionaries, Tilson Thomas has seen his radicalism become institutionalized, his tastes quasi conventional.
The world has caught up to him, both within and beyond music.
In 2014, he finally married Robison, his partner of 38 years.
Thats why Mahler wrote these pieces.
He was trying to tell us:Whatever happens, dont give up.
Dont give up on wonder.
Finding a way to make it specifically personal that thats the real art of making orchestral music.
Somewhere along the way, then, this onetime disruptor became an apostle of the mainstream.
Im definitely a partisan for very old-fashioned musical values, he admits.
And now we should know much more about the Asian and African cultural swaths.
Thats so essential to my experience of music.
Tilson Thomas looks skeptical.
Does the accessibility of all that information prevent it from actually sticking?
he wonders from leaving a more telling trace inside of wherever it is that the consciousness may truly dwell?
We live in a time in which by and large production values have superseded content, he declares.
I ask him if he has developed any new enthusiasms to supplement his undimmed admiration for James Brown.
He thinks about that for a minute, then shrugs.
Im kind of shielding myself from other experiences, he says.
I have a checklist of things I want to get done before Im outta here, he says.
What I dont know is: Just how much applause do I actually need to hear?
