Let’s not beat around the bush here—this is a marvelously entertaining program of (for the most part) still-neglected American modernist music, performed with gusto.

Michael Tilson Thomas has been a champion of adventurous music…and he brings a stylistic aptness and rhythmic security specific to each of these different works. © 2013 Fanfare Read complete review

…Michael Tilson Thomas doesn’t play these composers like they’re waggish tricksters, or possessed by idealistic amateurism. Far from it. Clearly Tilson Thomas considers each to be in some way ‘classic’, each note worthy of diligent finesse, each textural shift balanced to an MTT. The long and chromatically fecund unaccompanied trumpet prologue that launches Cowell’s 1930 Synchrony makes this point manifest: a badge of honour, please, to the San Francisco SO’s lead trumpeter, who plays with such unity of tone that you begin to suspect he or she has had a sustain pedal hooked into the bell of the instrument. And then Tilson Thomas peels the orchestra open like a considerable box of delights…