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Beethoven's Eroica
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Stravinsky's Rite of Spring
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Copland and the American Sound
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Keeping Score: MTT on Music
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Keeping Score on Television: Revolutions in Music

Music is the way it is now because, from time to time, revolutionary composers have rocked the world. Their work broke the old models and set a new course for the future. Recently, Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony have been looking at three of those revolutionaries: Beethoven, Stravinsky, and Copland.

Join us as we explore just what it was that made their work so groundbreaking.

Episode One: Beethoven’s Eroica

Not every revolution overthrows a government—some overturn artistic convention. Beethoven’s third Symphony, Eroica, defied accepted notions of music as decorative background for aristocratic amusement, and it forced the listener to confront the unconscious.

Beethoven spent three years composing the Eroica, an intimate journal of his emotional crises and his dramatic emergence as an original master. Michael Tilson Thomas and the musicians of the San Francisco Symphony help you make sense of this voyage into life as it really is. In visits to refined Viennese drawing rooms and rustic Austro-Hungarian villages, Michael Tilson Thomas explores how Beethoven channeled his sorrow over the loss of his hearing, and his disappointment with Napoleon’s imperial politics, to change the very definition of what a symphony could be.

The DVD of this episode includes a complete live performance by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.

Episode Two: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring

In 1913, with Europe on the brink of war, Igor Stravinsky produced a revolutionary event in music and dance at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. Known as The Rite of Spring, the ballet’s primitive score sparked a riot in the audience that evening, and became one of the most influential musical statements of the 20th century.

In this program, 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 earthy power of Russian folk music and dance. Thomas then retraces Stravinsky’s journey to the cultural crossroads of pre-war Paris. There, in collaboration with the great impresario Diaghilev and his star dancer Nijinsky, Stravinsky developed the shocking, sensual, and violent evocation of pagan Russia that became The Rite of Spring.

Nearly a century after this “wild rainforest of noise” was first performed, The Rite of Spring remains as exhilarating and liberating as music can be.

The DVD of this episode includes live performances by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and music from The Firebird.

Episode Three: Copland and the American Sound

Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn in 1900. His artistic development spanned enormous transformation in the American experience—the fears of World War I and the Great Depression, the energy of the Jazz Age, the advent of modernism. And as the nation emerged as a world power, Copland wrote music that gave Americans a sense of their own identity and created a truly American sound.

The DVD of this episode includes a complete live performance by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony of Copland’s Appalachian Spring.

Keeping Score in Concert

Also airing on PBS stations in High Definition (where available), two additional programs feature concert performances filmed for the Keeping Score series. The first, Beethoven’s Eroica in Concert, features a full concert performance of Beethoven’s groundbreaking Symphony No. 3. The second, Copland and Stravinsky in Concert, includes excerpts from Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, a vivid performance of The Rite of Spring, and a full performance of the original 13-instrument chamber version of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring.

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