Michael Tilson Thomas, 61, the music director of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, has a new project, the ambitious Keeping Score which he hopes will help make symphonic music less intimidating.

Chron.com reports: “Envisioned as a five-year, $23 million project, Keeping Score features a PBS series, a national radio series, an interactive Web site and outreach programs that organizers hope will involve 500 teachers and 75,000 students around the country.”

Thomas commented: “It presupposes the idea that there are intriguing things to find out about classical music– about the back story of the particular performance, and certainly the back story of the piece itself and the era of which it comes, and that it’s all fun to actually learn to comprehend things about the way music itself works.”

With Thomas in the updated Bernsteinesque role as guide, the TV series will debut in November, promising three ear-opening documentaries over successive weeks exploring Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Aaron Copland’s life and music.

The radio series, “The MTT Files,” will feature eight hourlong installments about life, music and art, including a Thomas interview of soul singer James Brown.

“The website will help novices and sophisticates better understand the piece’s themes, structure, orchestration and mood-changing keys. As the music plays, users can follow the score even if they can’t read notes. In a variation of follow the bouncing ball, the main themes will be highlighted as the music plays, enabling users to see how the composer tosses around melodies and harmonies to different instruments”.

David Kennard, who worked with Michael Tilson Thomas as co-producer of the TV series, said: “You can produce all that ‘Tubby the Tuba’-type thing, which these days doesn’t go down. What we tried to do is to capture him talking to us as individuals, to the single documentary camera, to really share why he constantly puts himself on the line in terms of exhaustion and everything else. There are you know a number of great conductors. But he’s a great conductor who can actually talk.”

On May 21st, the London Symphony Chorus celebrated its 40th anniversary in some style with a concert which will be followed by recordings, commissions and a party.

The London Symphony Chorus made its debut on Saturday 21 May 1966 when it recorded Mahler’s Symphony No 2 for Decca at the Kingsway Hall with Sir Georg Solti and the LSO.

On its 40th birthday the Chorus took part in a concert performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio to be recorded for LSO Live, conducted by its President Sir Colin Davis. The 40th anniversary was also marked by a concert of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony with the LSO on 4th June, conducted by the Chorus’ Conductor Emeritus and former Music Director Richard Hickox. The LSC Endowment Fund contributed to the cost of recording this concert; live for Chandos.

2006 is a landmark year for the London Symphony Chorus as it tours to the USA, Italy, France and Germany, as well as performing in London and other UK cities with Sir Colin Davis, Sir Bernard Haitink, Mark Elder, Valery Gergiev, Richard Hickox, James Judd, Neema Jarvi, Tadaaki Otaka, Daniel Gatti, Vasily Petrenko and Jean-Claude Casadesus.

Does classical music need superstars? Music critic and arts consultant Steve Metcalf writing in NewMusicBox.org thinks it does. “Or one, even,” he almost begs.

But what about Placido Domingo? Or the many great orchestras and conductors we have now, or does it go deeper?

Back in the 1950s, he writes, among performers, Toscanini, Heifetz, Maria Callas, and others, were known to almost everyone. Even as late as the 1980s, a classical performer could be truly famous. Now it’s different, he claims.

“If we speak of instrumentalists who can reliably sell out a house somewhere other than New York or L.A.,” Metcalf continues, “we have basically Yo-Yo (Ma). After that we have a roster of names that are known mostly to aficionados and the readers of Gramophone, but who are unknowns to everybody else. You don’t realize the extent to which this is true until you start working with and around people who pay no attention to serious music, which is most people these days. Try dropping the name Leif Ove Andsnes in your company cafeteria.”

Isn’t it great composers we need? There don’t seem to be many of those around now.

Stephen Walsh recalls the throngs that greeted the composer at concerts in America’s smaller towns and cities, not because they necessarily understood the music but because they wanted to see an icon.

Could crossover music have removed the gloss from the purely classical?