Of the many hundreds of exhilarating and memorable performances I’ve heard Michael Tilson Thomas deliver over the decades, nearly all have achieved their effect through the conductor’s sheer musicality. There have been standard classics of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, world premieres by established or up-and-coming living composers, and rarities from the operatic back catalogue of Russia, all performed with the flair and vitality that have made him one of the most significant conductors of our day.

Then there was a funny little anecdote, delivered with an offhand virtuosity for an audience of one. Sometime in the 2000s, I sat down for an interview in the large, handsomely appointed San Francisco Victorian house that Tilson Thomas, universally known as MTT, shares with his husband and business partner, Joshua Robison. We had an array of serious business to discuss that afternoon, but first, MTT launched into a story he’d heard from Takemitsu. It concerned the Japanese composer’s visit to Messiaen’s deathbed, during which he’d incurred the wrath of Mme Messiaen by praising one of the master’s works in terms she found impertinent. Telling the story called for MTT to impersonate Takemitsu impersonating both Messaiens in turn, and it was hilarious. It also defied replication. You had to be there.

Like some small, beautiful curio on a knick-knack shelf, this episode in all its triviality encapsulates something of the singularity that is MTT. The humour, the poignancy, the unexpected turns and the effortless showmanship on display all point towards the qualities of his work on a larger and more consequential canvas.

Above all, though, it’s the fleeting and protean quality of the event that corresponds, perhaps paradoxically, to MTT’s deepest artistic commitments. It matches his conviction that a musical experience is something to be grasped in the moment and savoured before it’s gone, with the understanding that the next iteration will be something related but entirely different.

What that means, in turn, is that MTT’s full artistic legacy is knowable only up to a point. Yes, there’s a huge discography spanning decades, including recordings that are now being reissued in deluxe, glossy box-sets as the conductor approaches his 80th birthday in December. There is the path-breaking multimedia project Keeping Score, a collection of video and audio offerings that serve simultaneously as educational material for the novice and a philosophical manifesto for the more expert. There is the thriving existence of the New World Symphony, the training orchestra he founded in Miami Beach, Florida, which continues to supply a steady stream of gifted young orchestral players to the musical organisations of the United States and beyond. And there are MTT’s own compositions, the products of a late-in-life surge of creative activity that are largely preserved in the traditional format of black dots on lined paper.

But that reckoning leaves out perhaps the largest and most ephemeral segment of MTT’s creative partnership with other musicians and with his audiences – the daily, weekly and annual cycle of live performances. Those are the moments in which familiar scores are looked at through a new lens, in which momentary sparks of inspiration can lead performers along unfamiliar interpretative paths, in which things can go gloriously right, or embarrassingly badly, for the first and only time.

Isn’t this a truism about all performing artists, though? Isn’t every foray onto a stage a brush with the unexpected and the irreproducible? To a certain extent, yes. But performing musicians can relate to the unpredictability of performance in a variety of ways, treating it as either a feature or a bug. For example, Herbert Blomstedt, the magnificent nonagenarian conductor who preceded MTT as the Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony from 1985 to 1995, used to (and probably still does) treat performance as a disciplined effort to embody a musical score as accurately and fully as possible. In this view, the meaning of a score is seen as a fixed platonic ideal, and each rehearsal and performance should carry an orchestra infinitesimally closer to that unattainable goal. For a musician like MTT, contrarily, the journey is the goal. Each rehearsal and each performance offers a new opportunity to create a lively, fluid, surprising version of a score we only think we know. A concert programme under his baton can sound startlingly different from one night to the next; a Beethoven symphony typically undergoes a thorough rethinking from year to year. If Blomstedt acts as a musical sculptor, painstakingly chipping away everything that isn’t the score (to adapt Michelangelo’s famous formulation), MTT is like a sketch artist trying out one interpretative possibility after another until the piece clicks.

‘Clicks’ here is a shorthand way of saying ‘clicks for an audience’, because MTT appreciates – in a way that not all musicians do – that his primary constituency as an artist comprises the listeners who fill a hall to participate in a communal musical experience. One way to frame this is as communicativeness; another is to treat it (either admiringly or sneeringly) as showmanship. One of MTT’s great achievements has been to eradicate that distinction entirely, forging a style that embraces the best of both worlds.

Showmanship, as many including himself have observed, is part of MTT’s patrimony: his paternal grandparents, Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, were giants of the Yiddish theatre in New York City throughout the early decades of the 20th century (a legacy that MTT celebrated in a 2011 stage production). Although Boris died in 1939, five years before his grandson was born, Bessie was a vibrant presence throughout his childhood, giving him lessons in theatrical panache both verbally and by example. A doted-upon only child, MTT also often credits his father, a theatrical stage manager, with helping to instil in him a love of music and the performing arts in general.

Growing up in Southern California in the 1950s and ’60s, he was exposed not only to the ever-present mores of Hollywood but also to the émigré culture that had sprung up in and around Los Angeles during the post-war years. He accompanied concerts and masterclasses of Jascha Heifetz and Gregor Piatigorsky (whom he still impersonates perfectly) as both conductor and pianist. He got to know Stravinsky, and participated as both pianist and conductor in premieres of works by him, Copland, Boulez and others. He spent a formative 1966 stint at the Bayreuth Festival without acquiring a very noticeable devotion to opera, a form which has scarcely figured at all in his professional career.

Michael Tilson Thomas backstage, London, LSO debut, 1970

Since 1969, when he was appointed Assistant Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, MTT has forged close partnerships with a series of orchestras, in addition to enjoying a broad guest conducting career. His first music directorship (1971-79), with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in upstate New York, allowed him to explore his longstanding interest in American music, particularly that of Cowell, Gershwin, Ives and Ruggles. He spent four years as Principal Guest Conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic (1981-85), and seven as Principal Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra (1988-95).

But alongside his work with the New World Symphony, which extended from its 1987 founding until 2022, the most consequential chapter of MTT’s career has been his 25-year tenure (1995-2020) as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony (of those two orchestras he is now respectively Artistic Director Laureate and Music Director Emeritus ). That San Francisco episode marks the high point of the orchestra’s 113-year history (one that also includes important chapters under the batons of Pierre Monteux and, of course, Blomstedt), and arguably stands as the leading exemplar for partnerships between an American orchestra and a music director around the turn of the 21st century.

Over the course of their quarter-century together, MTT and the members of the orchestra cultivated an easy, vibrant style of communication befitting his quasi-improvisatory aesthetic. Through hirings and promotions, he recast the orchestra in his own image, bringing in musicians who could think on their feet and respond confidently to unexpected swerves in tempo or phrasing. The orchestra’s repertoire broadened to include large swathes of American and contemporary music that had previously been under-represented. International touring and an expansive recording project, first for RCA Victor Red Seal and then for the in-house label SFS Media, brought a wealth of evidence to the wider world of what was taking place in what can often seem a geographically remote market.

None of that was necessarily foreseeable when MTT was first named in the position. His relationship with the orchestra was well established – he’d made his debut in San Francisco in 1974, conducting Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, and returned regularly as a guest conductor in the intervening years. But he had a reputation for being both brilliant and headstrong, and his fondness for offbeat repertoire and daring programming combinations was the sort of thing that could potentially not have been welcomed within all segments of a musical community.

In the event, it didn’t take long to establish that MTT’s hiring was both a wise and a far-sighted choice. His first season in San Francisco witnessed an all-out public relations blitz – portraiture on banners and posters all over town, a round of interviews and feature articles in every segment of the media – of the sort that orchestras generally mount for new music directors but that don’t always prove persuasive. This one did. Local audiences understood right away, almost intuitively, that the coming years were going to be a revelation.

For his first subscription season, MTT laid down a marker by including one piece by an American composer on every programme, and juxtaposing it with pieces from the standard repertoire; the implicit claim, ‘Copland and Brahms belong together’, was lost on no one. He opened that season with a newly commissioned, typically idiosyncratic curtain-raiser by Lou Harrison, who had long been one of the leading compositional figures of Northern California, and whose music had never been played by the orchestra. He concluded it with the American Festival – a two-week celebration of the experimentalism of American mavericks which included members of the Grateful Dead in a performance of music by John Cage. By the time he’d presented his first named American Mavericks festival in 2000 with a new collection of repertoire, his point had been lastingly made, with San Francisco audiences embracing the music of Terry Riley, Antheil, Feldman and more as readily as they might have lapped up yet another Beethoven festival.

MTT and André Previn at an LSO rehearsal, Barbican Hall, 1994 (photo: Keith Saunders)

The years and decades that followed found the collaboration between conductor and orchestra growing ever deeper and broader. Although he rarely sets foot in an opera house, MTT brought opera into the orchestra’s Davies Symphony Hall home, with memorable semi-staged productions of Der fliegende Holländer, Peter Grimes, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s resplendent and rarely heard Mlada. He championed the music of Bernstein, his longtime mentor and friend, and commissioned works from Brant (the Pulitzer Prize-winning organ concerto Ice Field, premiered in 2001), John Adams, Robin Holloway and many others. He made room for visual components in the concert hall, in all their unnerving and unsteady ambition.

Then came the music of Mahler, to which MTT and the orchestra returned again and again as if to some oracular source of wisdom. Just about every season included one or two of the composer’s works, always rethought and recontextualised since the previous performance in some way that could not have been foreseen. I’ve heard MTT lead the orchestra in a terrifyingly stark Sixth Symphony, a rueful and consolatory Sixth Symphony and a questioning Sixth Symphony. I’ve heard him make the Fifth Symphony sound triumphal or ferocious at different times – sometimes on consecutive nights.

The complete Mahler cycle that MTT and the San Francisco Symphony recorded between 2001 and 2009 is a landmark achievement, with seven Grammys to prove it. But again, the live performances captured there reflect only one slice of the totality, a splendiferous but necessarily arbitrary snapshot from a project that has evolved endlessly over time.

Around the turn of the millennium, MTT turned his attention more consistently to composition, excavating early sketches to see what he could salvage from them and channelling a lifetime of music-making into a string of imaginative new works. They include shapely orchestral song-cycles setting the poetry of Walt Whitman (1999) and Emily Dickinson (2002), a wonderfully growly contrabassoon concerto (Urban Legend, 2002) and an orchestral evocation of his life as a dog owner and dog walker. (That music, much of it newly recorded, is collected on a new Pentatone set, reviewed on page 105.)

The MTT era in San Francisco should by rights have concluded in triumph, but the gods had other plans. On the evening of March 6, 2020, just moments after he and the orchestra had concluded the first in a scheduled series of performances of Mahler’s Sixth, the city’s public venues were ordered shut in the face of the newly emerging coronavirus that would soon be known to the world as Covid-19. One chunk at a time, all the scheduled activities of the remaining months of MTT’s tenure – concerts, parties, tributes, one final international tour – ended up on the chopping block. It would be more than a year before the San Francisco Symphony, now led by Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, could make even the most tentative return to live performances.

MTT with his beloved San Francisco Symphony, of which he was Music Director for 25 years

And there was worse to come. In July 2021, just as musical life was beginning to return from the pandemic, MTT was diagnosed with a brain tumour and underwent emergency surgery, cancelling all his scheduled appearances. The illness was later identified as glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive form of brain cancer.

Yet three years later, in defiance of medical expectations, MTT remains active – conducting, teaching, overseeing recordings and more. In January of this year he led the San Francisco Symphony in a stirring account of Mahler’s Fifth, and was honoured by the city’s decision to rename the block that runs in front of Davies Symphony Hall MTT Way. This year alone, he has made acclaimed guest appearances in San Diego, Los Angeles, London and Copenhagen; at time of writing, he was preparing to conduct the September season-opening concerts of the New York Philharmonic.

Occasionally, MTT has described his overarching philosophy as a quest to understand ‘what now is’. At its most rudimentary level, this is a question about rhythm (is the down-beat here or here?). But it’s a concern that also ripples concentrically outwards in many directions. What do we bring to a musical experience – as listeners, as performers – that is specific to the moment? What do we take away from it, and what do we do with those memories after the moment has passed? How do we understand what we heard, and how can we recognise it if we hear it again?

Any answers are necessarily provisional, which is why the quest is an unending one. It’s a project that MTT has been pursuing, with characteristic resourcefulness and imagination and resilience, for decades. The only thing we can say for sure is that you have to be there – in the moment, in the now.

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