From the Diary of Anne Frank (1990)

Tilson Thomas's versatile score, ranging from early pastoral idylls to atonal pieces for the victims of the Holocaust, deserves a longer life.

What immediately strikes one about Tilson Thomas's From The Diary of Anne Frank is its diversity of style. An easy-going quasi-pastoral idiom introducing the diary and its writer leads to a playful dodecaphonic passage to a further non-tonal tumult of outraged protest, to a powerful Mahlerian/Bergian elegy for the victims of the holocaust.

Tilson Thomas's musical style here may be eclectic, but the musical imagery complements the spoken text, be it in a Bernstein-like exuberance or in the heavy-laden dissonances redolent of Shostakovich writing in similar Holocaust context.

Tilson Thomas's score is a thoroughly accomplished piece of work, an amalgam of Bernstein and Copland, with a dash or two of Walton and Hollywood thrown in....This is a work which effectively dispels the usual curse on pieces for speaking voice and orchestra.