On a means to a new trade agreement to that end N.P.R.'s Emily Fang tells us Beijing has announced it will waive the tariffs on some shipments of American pork and soybeans China's finance ministry said American pork and soybean sellers could apply for tariff waivers but didn't say the quantity of shipments involved Americans Libyans import had been subject to an extra 25 percent tariff since last July but an ongoing swine flu epidemic has decimated China's pig herds by as much as 40 percent causing prices to skyrocket N.P.R.'s Emily Fang reporting despite an appeal from Turkey a NATO allies at this week's summit in London appear unwilling to endorse uncurse policy of designating Syrian Kurdish fighters as terrorists the Turkish government's latest protest comes months after its cross border offensive against Syrian Kurdish fighters despite the diplomatic clash Turkey eventually dropped its objection to a NATO pact that would bolster the defense of Poland and the Baltic states neighboring Russia this is n.p.r. News. A drug that reduces delusions for patients with Parkinson's disease might also help patients with dementia and Alzheimer's Here's N.P.R.'s Patti naman with details the medication brand named new plays it was approved in 2016 to treat Parkinson's related psychosis it's a daily pill researchers think works by blocking a chemical in the brain that causes delusions researchers were studying whether the drug might also help to mention patients the study was called to a stop when it was determined the drug was beneficial patients on placebo were more than twice as likely as those taking new places to have to Lucian's side effects were relatively minor headaches and urinary tract infections the drug's manufacturer plans to meet with f.d.a. Officials early next year to work toward approval of the drug for dementia related psychosis Patty naman n.p.r. News at a conference yesterday Biogen offered up more data that it said supported the possibilities of an experimental Alzheimer's drug the company present findings for as you can imagine that one point was considered a failure Amazon's conceding it's having trouble delivering packages on time this holiday season the online retail giant is warning its customers that they may have to wait longer than initially estimated because of the sheer volume of orders made during Black Friday and Cyber Monday this after Amazon staked its reputation on on time deliveries Amazon says it plans to spend one and a half $1000000000.00 in part to hire more people to pack and ship orders this is n.p.r. News support for n.p.r. Comes from Capital One offering the spark cash card for businesses committed to helping business owners turn purchases into meaningful investments that can help drive business forward Capital One what's in your wallet more at Capital One dot com and Americans for the Arts. Like so many African-American kids the young baritone on from the top grew up singing rousing gospel music in church his grandma sang on the same touring circuit as a wreath the Frank let his uncle perform with Louis Armstrong but it's classical music that's reading this teenager to excel hear him sing the music of Scarlatti on this week's from the top hope you can join us Sunday night at 11. This is Fresh Air I'm David Bianculli editor of the website t.v. Worth Watching sitting in for Terry Gross. That's Aaron Copeland's believe the kid performed by the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas our 1st guest today on fresh air this weekend Thomas will be one of 5 honorees saluted for a lifetime artistic achievement at the Kennedy Center Honors celebration in a star studded tribute which will be televised December 15th on c.b.s. The other honorees this year are Sally Field Linda Ronstadt Sesame Street and the r. And b. Band Earth Wind and Fire. Michael Tilson Thomas was only $24.00 when he 1st conducted the Boston Symphony filling in mid concert for the ailing conductor he founded the New World Symphony and also served as music director of the buffalo Philharmonic and principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra Terry Gross 1st spoke with Michael Tilson Thomas in 1905 shortly after he became the music director of the San Francisco Symphony which he continues to lead today. As a teenager you participate in the Premier of works by bless Stockhausen Copeland Stravinsky. You worked with them directly yes yes indeed Yeah so did they give you a sense of what to expect. If you made music into your life you know if you live the life of a musician. Well they did many people did I mean also. Copeland But I very early perceived that there were some people in the music business who had been playing music for their whole lives who seemed to be ennobled and transfigured merely by the process of making music and others who seem to be very unhappy embittered by the experience of making music and so I was trying from the very beginning to understand what was the difference between these people and where did the choice live between having a life in music that made you very very happy or one that made you very frustrated when we able to figure out well I decided way back then that it was important for musicians to kind of take a musical Hippocratic oath before they went into the fashion and what is the of that you have to discover that it's just necessary for you to make music I mean to be a musician you have to love. Music as much as eating or sleeping or dreaming or all those other ngs and you can't be sure when you enter the profession of music where it may take you it is uncertain it depends a lot on being very well prepared and being in the right place at the right time but I remember a moment when I was around 18 or 19 I was walking on the u.s.c. Campus where I was going to school and I thought to myself well I know that I'm good enough I know I'm good enough I could be a university musician and they're wonderful things happening at this music at this music school of great quality and expression and if I could do this as long as I can make music I'll be very happy and if it turns out that I can make music in some larger arena Well we'll see about that but it's I know that it's music itself which is this process this dialogue with. With something in my spirit that I must pursue and then I knew I was going into music with. No with no other agenda it was just the music itself that mattered it was those people who for whom music truly mattered who were the ones that had wonderful lives as musicians you know and you said you thought musicians should take a Hippocratic oath I thought it would be you know 1st do no harm and that would be something like never perform boring works. Well never perform with your heart not being in it never never allowed yourself to get to the point where it's a job always make sure that your spirit is focused so that so that communicating music to other people is it is a central priority for you. Conducting a question and I mean a stick stick question you studied you know classical stick technique how much of that do you use now and how much of your take is is based on what you've Like learned in improvised over the years it's definitely a mixture of both I think the easiest way for you to understand this is that there's a constant given take process going on in the rehearsals and in the performance itself so there are certain key moments where I have to really indicate the exact of a certain moment in time to get around a particular corner and then having done that then I what I want to do is sort of turn over the lead of the music to perhaps a solo oboe player or perhaps the viola section or maybe a brass chorale all those different groups within the orchestra have their own have their own reaction time they all take breaths at a different speed they all have a a different way of into reacting and it's possible with my battle or with a little bit of body language or in using my eyes a lot mostly in using my life facial expression my contact with the orchestra shapes all those things. You are very close to Leonard Bernstein do you feel like you learned a lot about conducting technique from him of course I learned a lot from him by observing him and mostly through the kind of colloquy concerning music that we had over many years when I was studying pieces I had the opportunity to you know to call me up and ask questions and. The best kind of a rabbinic style almost always when I asked him a question he would ask me a question back and by this kind of dialogue of questions you know he would help me to really find my own way. Of doing the music that was of course terrific and. I guess my conducting style has become a lot freer it's a lot more economical now maybe than it was 10 years ago but you know these things these things change I I can only say that now it feels to me in the repertoire that's really the mind that as if I'm making the music happen in space as if I'm touching the notes and actually molding them and shaping them in some kind of plastic way you know with within Time itself you are in the role of the James Brown ones right now well I was with him for a couple of days I met him in Boston he was doing a little he was doing a show in a small jazz club and I told him I was a great admirer of his and he said Well come on the road you know see how we do it because I asked him how he got the band to be so tight and this is the time when he was doing sex machine was his big hit and I spent 3 or 4 days with him in Atlanta Ga and in Washington d.c. Watching from backstage just what he did and it was a great thrill so did you learn anything you could apply absolutely because what I realized that he was focused on the exact duration of the perceivable present in every particular piece the stroke of the Beat had a certain length he one of the the truck driver to be out in front in the hand drummer to be in the back and the bass player to be right the center and he had an exact idea of how wide in time that stroke of the chunk chunk would be would be and he any used that was something very sophisticated and just the kind of thing that composers like Igor Stravinsky thought about a great deal so did it change the way you conducted it all or the way you organized your beat it didn't change the way I conducted so much but it changed the way I could listen to music and imagine how the it too is the exact moment of the attack of music could be really artfully crafted to propel the music in different ways but you didn't have the artist to do the beat on the one. I had the Orks to do whatever's necessary right. That's conductor Michael Tilson Thomas speaking to Terry Gross in 1905 after a break we'll hear a more recent interview about his grandparents the Thomas chef skis who were prominent stars of the year theater This is Fresh Air. I'm Ira Flatow join me on Science Friday for the best science book. And this time we're throwing in Best Science Board games too and we want your suggestions so chime in on the Science Friday vox pop out of the park. To answer mysteries about the sun up close and personal it's all on Science Friday. Afternoon. This is Fresh Air conductor Michael Tilson Thomas is one of the honorees who will be saluted at this weekend's annual Kennedy Center Honors Terry Gross spoke with him again in 2012 when he had written and appeared in a p.b.s. Great performances special on his grandparents Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky who were prominent stars of the year. Boris was a producer he built theaters and he starred in productions of new plays and musicals as well as classic plays translated in the. Bar as did the 1st year production of Hamlet when he died in 193330000 people gathered on the Lower East Side for his funeral Boris and Bessie each emigrated to America from the Ukraine in the 880 s. Before we listen to Terry's 2012 conversation with Michael Tilson Thomas let's hear an archival recording of Boris Thomas singing a song in the film bar mitzvah. Was. Was to. Be. He. Was. So that's Forrest Thomas Esky the star of the it ish stage who is the late grandfather of my guest conductor Michael Tilson Thomas Michael Tilson Thomas welcome back to Fresh Air Thank you pleasure so your grandfather sang in synagogues in the Ukraine and on the Lower East Side of Manhattan before singing on the stage do you think he was influenced as a singer by the cantorial tradition. Very much so because in bourses family all my great great grandfathers had been mostly Cozzens counters except the ones who had become instead bodkins let's to say kind of village entertainers people who would get up on a chair at a wedding and sing a song which was completely appropriate to the occasion which was expected on that occasion and yet it would have improvised lyrics little outtakes that made it completely individual to that night so there was that sacred and profane division always in the family and Boris's father who already had a kind of wandering spirit as it was called nonetheless sent Boris to the best cum Tauriel school in Russia in bar ditch of where he became a star. The rule of the a dish theater was very important for Jewish immigrants United States many of whom spoke only and so they couldn't read the regular newspapers a lot of the English language theater would not have literal meaning to them because I wouldn't understand the language of the stage I mean that was a really important particularly New York a really important. Place for gathering and for. Doing anything cultural Well absolutely because there were very many newspapers in New York and Philadelphia and Chicago and all these major cities at that time but for the audience to go to the theater to experience a show especially a show which was very often my grandfather's case a kind of spectacle gave them a sense of the importance the sheer scale of what was achievable by an immigrant in the United States it inspired the old ladies used to come up to be on the street and said we were kids we had nothing but once a week or once a month we went to the theater and we saw the red velvet curtains with the name Thomas chef ski and large gold letters and we thought if that's possible for him it's possible for us to do the name Thomas Esky is such a famous name in the world of theatre and in the world of years theater I grew up knowing that name I knew that there were times were famous for a performance on the stage but that's about all I knew your last name is Thomas which is an abbreviated version of Thomas chefs he had a Thomas become Thomas. It really started with my father who was trying to make his own way in life in the theater and he simply was unable to do that everywhere that he went he would mention his last name and right away it was oh you're Boris the son and therefore of a he didn't want that he just wanted to be able to find his own way in life and in the theater so he was the one who changed his name initially to Ted Thomas and quite frankly. He also want to to escape from that whole crazed celebrity situation which my grand parents inspired and I think he also wanted to protect me from that because there were crazed fans the only way of describing there were stalker kinds of people who were pursuing my grandparents and their children and with the same kind of ardor that we're accustomed to thinking of crazy paparazzi or fans pursuing stars today were you aware of that when you were growing up your grandfather was dead but your grandmother there didn't tell you were 16 or 17 and she lived nearby and I think you were pretty close to her did you get a sense of people stocking her or is it way too late for that she was already in her seventy's. Well she had also moved out to l.a. And one of the reasons of for doing that outside of getting some character parts in movies she hoped for. Was that she wanted to get away from the whole scene in New York a town as she said with too many ghosts but what I really became aware of the shadow of Boris for the 1st time was when I went back East when I was perhaps 11 or 12 and I was going to a lot of shows stage manager cousins of mine because so many members of the family were still in the business in showbiz not necessarily as actors on stage but in everything having to do with the behind the scenes life. And we used to go to just one scene every place so theater people they say oh a kid the good seem to see the Lunts Act 2 finale is good for his joke in the 2nd scene of the 1st act is good you know saw that kind of stuff but there was this one show My Fair Lady and everybody was talking about it and I thought I'd like to see it my mother said Don't ask Cousin Georgia to get you into that show it's the hardest ticket to get and just be a monster so of course when I saw him I meet at the said could we see My Fair Lady we went to the theater people were lined up. Run the block to hopefully get some returns and he went over to the stage door knocked into the hay is Iran and Izzy company manager came out and my cousin indicated me as a hey Izzie see this kid Boris Thomas chef ski's grandson 2 minutes later we were in row 5 right in the center of that theater over your grandfather died before your you were born you got to know your grandmother Bessie Thomashefsky pretty well and tell us about the kind of parts that she played in the a dish the hair. Bessie started out as a young girl she was about 5 and she arrived in the United States from the Ukraine and she met Boris kind of eloped with him when she was young teenager and 1415 years old and she began finding her way in the theater 1st playing kind of innocent young girl roles but as time went on She also discovered her enormous abilities as a comedian and she very often played trouser parts or parts involving. Women being disguised as men for particular political or educational social purposes a little bit like what the story of a young till is right Bessie did a lot of plays like that where a woman disguises herself as a man in order to gain the advantages of education or whatever that a man can have what did she tell you about women's rights and the disparities facing women won she was young well she went from being a little girl in a village that was asked to bring in the goats and do other domestic chores to working in a tobacco factory in Baltimore and then suddenly finding herself on stage as a star pretty quickly. But she went beyond that she wanted to know everything about the structure of the theater and she became a very effective producer and manager and someone who paid far more attention to the whole business and organization aspect of the theater than my grandfather did who was the kind of big dreamer and partier and that was so unusual for a woman of those days I have some correspondence of hers where she's writing to us of people who put into an ad in some big paper that she was going to be a part of some season they were doing and she writes to them saying that she absolutely has not agreed to do this and these are the conditions which they must immediately fulfill in order for this to happen it's really very very tough and straight talk and there's a lot of stuff about her I didn't have room for the show remarkable things like when she was arrested by Theodore Roosevelt this happened in this way in New York there were blue laws at the time meaning that performances were forbidden on Sunday but of course in the interest theater Sunday was a very big day because Saturday was the Sabbath so they played on Sunday at one point when t.r. Was police commissioner of New York he and some of his men raided one of the Thomas eskies theaters and he came in. He saw Bessie who was very young and who looked much younger than she was always and he said Look out little girl and she said little girl my ass I'm the star of anybody's being taken and it's my. That's so funny so she got arrested she jest exactly the way she