Miami Beach seems an unlikely venue for a noble, idealistic artistic venture. Yet it is here that the New World Symphony has made its base for more than 20 years. It’s a sort of equivalent to our own National Youth Orchestra, with the same sense of joyous dedication wherein hard work becomes fun; but with the important difference that these young players are geared from the start towards the professional life of an orchestral musician. Rehearsals are strictly timed, there is a weekly stipend and players will all be seeking, and hopefully finding, positions in fully grown-up institutions all over the United States and the wider world, where many alumni are already placed. After years of work — and concerts in a converted cinema — their magnificent permanent home, custom-designed by Frank Gehry of Bilbao fame, is close to completion and will be inaugurated next year.
All this is the dreamchild of Michael Tilson Thomas. The dream has been realised through charm, charisma, patient persistence and sheer slog. He is still widely regarded over here as a bit of a playboy but for all the manifest brilliance of the heir to ‘Lenny’ Bernstein, in terms of glamour and flashy theatricality, this outstanding musician is, in fact, in his maturity, absolutely sober and dedicated across an extraordinarily wide range of repertoire to the highest standards. No one who witnessed the recent week that the NWS in Miami devoted to prolonged intricate rehearsal of a pair of Debussy orchestral masterpieces could doubt that MTT is the Real Right Thing. La mer, by now a warhorse for colourful display, and often coarsely, even carelessly interpreted, came alive, fresh-renewed by countless tiny details scrupulously moulded with a tireless pursuit of exactly the right nuance. While Jeux, the late masterpiece for dance that blooms best in the concert hall, responded yet more richly, in its infinite multicoloured subtlety, to comparable attentions. Then, with the public concerts themselves, caution was put aside in favour of spontaneity and surprise, as though conductor and players were encountering these scores for the first time.
The ex-cinema, despite a thickish acoustic and cramped foyer and office space, shows the district’s distinctive Art Deco elegance to advantage, and is set amid an area, slightly inland from the beach, of smaller residential buildings in the streamlined pastel-hued vernacular, which peak at intersections into boutiques and bistros whose clothes and fare vie with each other in exotic bizarreness and skimpy coverage of what they purport to clothe and feed.
Nothing exiguous about the near-complete Gehry structure nearby. Suitably shod and hard-hatted, I was taken on an internal tour to boggle the eyes. This architect’s trademark is a daring and exuberant play of massive sculptural forms — as though a Henry Moore two-piece figure were hugely expanded into a figure-of-eight, rendered featherlite, and crossed with an equally gigantic Alexander Calder mobile — which dominate the central concert area. Public spaces are handsome, offices and rehearsal spaces generous. Next door on one side stands the only multistorey car park in the world (surely) that is also a work of art; on the other, the current building site will be landscaped into a garden. Riveting for now, though soon to be for ever dispersed, is the fantastic internal network of scaffolding plus ramshackle walkways, stairs, ladders, incredibly tempting to the monkey lying deep within every human being. I had to be forcibly restrained from taking to the ropes.
Already hot and humid enough by English standards, the weather and the resulting spirit of place inspire flagrant exposure of nude human flesh, irrespective of age, gender, comeliness. I and my old friend the composer Colin Matthews spent most of the time at the workplace, of course. We were there for a week given over to Debussy because we have both orchestrated some of the Master’s piano music — me, the great late masterpiece for two pianos en blanc et noir, still relatively little known; Colin, all 24 of the Préludes for solo piano, some of them very well known indeed (the selection chosen for these concerts included la cathédrale engloutie). It was wonderful to hear, over the week’s detailed exploration, how our reverent and loving translations from keyboard to symphony orchestra gradually then wholly came to sound as though they, too, were written for orchestra from the start. And courteously the management also included an original piece for large forces, and a chamber piece, from each of us.
My admiration for what’s being realised here, at the highest level, by MTT and his New World vision was daily renewed and enhanced as the week wore on. And they’ll have the finest building for many miles around.
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