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Music Review

Nu? Is This 2nd Ave.? No, It’s Lincoln Center

In everything he does, from conducting the San Francisco Symphony to spearheading that orchestra’s multimedia educational project “Keeping Score,” Michael Tilson Thomas brings thorough musicianship sparked with theatrical flair. On Tuesday night an audience that packed Avery Fisher Hall learned about the roots of Mr. Thomas’s theatrical instincts when the New York Philharmonic presented “The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater,” directed by Patricia Birch, in the first of two performances.

This semistaged program takes the form of a personal memoir in which Mr. Thomas tells the story of his grandparents Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, pioneers in the Yiddish theater, which thrived at the turn of the 20th century on the Lower East Side and on tours to American cities. But along the way the program also provides an inside story of this vibrant people’s art form, with Mr. Thomas as a warm, wry and loving narrator, supported by a cast of four musical theater performers, archival film clips and the Philharmonic, reduced in size and sounding like a Yiddish theater pit band.

Since 1998 the Thomashefsky Project has been uncovering and reclaiming the music and arrangements of Yiddish theater works. The arrangements Mr. Thomas conducted, as in a medley from “Dos Pintele Yid” (“A Little Spark of Jewishness”), were as close in sound and style to the originals as you are likely to hear.

Not content to tell stories and conduct, Mr. Thomas, who last week led a demanding program with the New York Philharmonic, played a snappy piano accompaniment to a Yiddish song, “A Coat From Old-Time Stuff,” sung by the sassy Judy Blazer, who portrayed Bessie Thomashefsky. In Act II Mr. Thomas stopped the show by singing “Who Do You Suppose Married My Sister? Thomashefsky.” This 1910 song poked fun at Boris Thomashefsky’s womanizing ways.

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The Thomashefskys Michael Tilson Thomas and Judy Blazer, with the New York Philharmonic, at Avery Fisher Hall on Tuesday night.Credit...Daniel Barry for The New York Times

Mr. Thomas first presented a version of this program in 2005 at Zankel Hall and has been performing and refining it since. What comes through most is his affection for his grandparents, both born in shtetls outside Kiev, who met in Baltimore when young Boris was on tour and Bessie was 14.

Boris, who died at 71 in 1939, five years before Mr. Thomas was born, was played here by Shuler Hensley, who brought gusto and a hearty voice to the role. But it was hard for Mr. Hensley to compete with the real Boris, whom we glimpsed in a clip from the 1935 Yiddish film “Bar Mitzvah,” singing “Be Virtuous” to the young initiate into Jewish manhood with cantorial intensity. In his prime years Boris ran his troupe, built a theater on Second Avenue and achieved success with works ranging from Yiddish comedies to adaptations of the classics, including “Der Yeshive Bokher,” a Hasidic “Hamlet,” billed as “translated and improved upon by Boris Thomashefsky.” Ronit Widmann-Levy and Eugene Brancoveanu also sang and played various roles winningly.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Mr. Thomas knew Bessie as a grandmother in her 80s, and clearly adored her. She regaled her musical grandson with stories of her stardom and performed songs at family gatherings. She began her career as a late adolescent, with trouser roles as her specialty, but evolved into a wisecracking, sassy singer and actress paving the way for later stars like Fanny Brice. “Khantshe in Amerike,” which opened in 1912, was her biggest hit, a work ahead of its time about a young woman who comes to America and, determined to drive a car, disguises herself as a boy.

Mr. Thomas (whose father, Ted Thomas, changed his family name) speaks with honesty about his grandmother’s decision to separate from her philandering, spendthrift husband. His most moving recollection came when he recalled Bessie, who died in 1962 when he was 17, telling him, “You are just like me.” He must live his life his own way, she said, adding, “Look at me.”

That is just what Mr. Thomas does in this personal and fascinating program.

A correction was made on 
April 11, 2011

A music review on Thursday of the New York Philharmonic presentation of “The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater,” in which Michael Tilson Thomas tells the story of his pioneering grandparents, misstated the name of a multimedia educational project that Mr. Thomas leads as music director of the San Francisco Symphony. It is “Keeping Score,” not “Making Music.”

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: Nu? Is This 2nd Ave.? No, It’s Lincoln Center. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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