Despite expressing qualms about the impact of recorded music on intelligent listening, Michael Tilson Thomas has made a great many records for a variety of labels. Compilation of these 80th-birthday retrospectives will have been assisted by more recent corporate consolidation. Other avenues remain best explored by independents. The conductor’s advocacy of contemporary British music is chiefly accessible by way of NMC, while his own compositional career is celebrated in Pentatone’s four‑disc collection ‘Grace’ (A/24).

From Seiji Ozawa’s Boston-made Petrushka (with young Mike Thomas at the piano) to Joshua Bell’s live Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto (under maestro MTT in Berlin), The Complete Columbia, Sony and RCA Recordings spans an eclectic 35 years. The earliest official CBS/Columbia releases have little to do with Western art music. First of the 80 discs included here is ‘Apocalypse’, a 1974 album credited to guitarist John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra and produced by ex-Parlophone stalwart George Martin. Does its blend of prog rock, jazz fusion and Indian spiritualism amount to more than a period piece? Martin thought so. Then again, the trail could have started with the 22-year-old’s harpsichord continuo on Robert Craft’s recording of Monteverdi’s Vespers (CBS, 11/67). Or those slightly mysterious Craft-led West Coast Stravinsky sessions attributed to the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. Instead, Sony Classical’s handsome ‘booklet’, actually a chunky hardback, apologises for the unavailability of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker (CBS, 3/87) and, more curiously, John Tavener’s The Repentant Thief, a Collins Classics original (3/92). A clutch of concerto collaborations with Japanese pianist Kazune Shimizu may be new to the UK but, so far as I can see, there are no hitherto unreleased gems.

Fewer in number, the Complete Deutsche Grammophon & Argo Recordings are similarly freewheeling. Tilson Thomas features as pianist in Debussy’s Violin and Cello Sonatas, half a Boston Symphony Chamber Players LP (DG, 4/71) preserved in its entirety to fit the original-cover-art packaging model favoured by both sets. The present 14-disc sequence stops short of the 21st century save for a further manifestation of LSO ‘crossover’: Elvis Costello’s ballet project Il Sogno (DG, 11/04). For some reason the contents are almost but not quite organised chronologically. Conspicuously absent is the San Francisco Symphony, the orchestra MTT first fronted in 1974, becoming its galvanising Music Director for an unprecedented quarter-century (from 1995) before assuming the title of Music Director Laureate.

Relatively early associations predominate even in Sony Classical’s lavish compendium (occupying a full foot of shelf space). Filing neatly beneath a lift-off lid, component discs are accommodated in wallets sturdy enough to boast a spine, vinyl LP originals retaining miniaturised sleeve notes on the reverse. Nostalgic European collectors may be mildly disconcerted by design variants intended for the US market. The preponderance of elegant shades of blue presumably matches the conductor’s favourite colour. Where Eloquence includes a useful note by Peter Quantrill, here MTT’s own gracious keynote address and Copland-themed essay are supported by contributions from three of his producers, large-print track-lists and a discography.

London recordings were usually made on the hoof after concerts, disparate venues tweaked to provide the effect preferred by a not always unflappable maestro. As Andreas Neubronner explains, if ‘big, full, ear-pleasing “cinema” sound’ was a prerequisite so too was allowing every detail of a score to be heard. With percussion a bolder presence than in more decorous old-school productions, Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture is boisterous indeed at the close. Then again the unclattery Brahms Serenades also sound for once properly fresh. Gramophone’s Michael Oliver didn’t much like the ‘young man’s music’ effect in Debussy’s La mer (with the Philharmonia). Its big tuttis and moments of exceptional clarity were deemed ‘not often satisfyingly integrated … like plum cake with the fruit sticking out’. That seems unfair but reflects the slightly grudging attitude with which the young American’s endeavours could be received.

Eloquence showcases MTT’s earliest recordings as conductor, made for the yellow label shortly after he had signed on in Boston as assistant to the regularly indisposed William Steinberg. ‘Classics’ or not – opinions will differ – their crisp transparency is rescued from any suggestion of routine by the Francophile timbre of an orchestra full of players from its glory days. The warm bath of hall resonance may be one reason why Debussy’s Images and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, favourites of the conductor in these incarnations, would later be remade. So too his pioneering versions of ‘American Maverick’ repertoire by Ives and Ruggles, stage one in an ongoing crusade. Highlights never revisited include Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony and Walter Piston’s irresistible Second.

DG’s association with the maestro resumed during his LSO tenure though not every venture retains the impact of the live recording of Bernstein’s On the Town. Avoiding composerly exaggeration, this marries super-idiomatic playing with inspired casting. The stellar supporting line-up includes Samuel Ramey and Cleo Laine, alone worth the price of admission. Thomas Hampson and Frederica von Stade return as soloists in Arias and Barcarolles, Bernstein’s last major work, where Bruce Coughlin’s alternative orchestration was deemed redundant. At least the suite from A Quiet Place salvages something compelling from that operatic misfire. We switch to the Argo label for three marvellous discs from the New World Symphony, young orchestral musicians at the start of their careers. The first is the most immediately accessible, a Latin American showcase entitled ‘Tangazo’ with music by Chávez, Copland, Ginastera, Piazzolla, Revueltas and more. The second is a tribute to MTT’s teacher Ingolf Dahl, whose carefully honed neoclassical idiom is even less in vogue today. Not so the other-worldly shimmer of Morton Feldman. There are newer iterations of his Coptic Light from which this selection borrowed its title in 1998, none more poised or sensuous.

Back to Sony Classical’s shrine to ‘middle-period’ MTT where collectors ready to take the plunge will doubtless have their own favourites. En route to San Francisco the post-Boston itinerary goes via Buffalo, doubling back to Los Angeles and London with detours to continental Europe and later Miami, where the New World Symphony was co-founded in 1987. RCA’s retrenchment and the advent of SFS Media’s sonically top-notch own label explains why, when it comes to Mahler, the compilers can muster only a San Franciscan Das klagende Lied (RCA, 9/97). The LSO is represented by the highly rated Third and Seventh Symphonies (plus Janet Baker’s valedictory Rückert Lieder). No bad thing perhaps when too much emphasis on MTT’s luminous, latterly sometimes inert way with the composer risks playing into the cliché that depicts him as some kind of Bernstein manqué. At times he does seem to be following the template – why else is his account of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony so broad? – but his best work finds a different balance between clarity and razzmatazz. The meticulous beauties of Stravinsky’s modernism and ‘his supreme gift for choosing the right notes’ hold as much appeal as The Rite of Spring’s rhythmic power. In music not so much ‘rooted in earth’ as tripping on gossamer wings, MTT (family name Thomashefsky) shows himself a deft purveyor of the lighter Tchaikovsky, as of Debussy, Gershwin and Feldman. Teutonic weight may come less naturally. Yet today, as the conductor battles aggressive brain cancer, it is quite something to revisit the heroic music-making that persuaded the LSO to offer him the post of Principal Conductor in the mid-1980s. Reviewing for Gramophone, Michael Kennedy reckoned Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben not one whit inferior to Karajan’s: ‘If this is what the LSO/Tilson Thomas partnership is to be like, then long may it thrive.’ Scarcely Bernstein repertoire, dated only in the sense that nothing is rushed, it sounds magnificent.

Other ‘significant’ recordings probably don’t include what was, in its day, an innovatively small-scale Beethoven cycle, made (mostly) with the English Chamber Orchestra. Less cautious-sounding Beethovenian oddments had been taped with the LSO, the London orchestra most accustomed to off-the-scale versatility. Two American series with landmark status launched during MTT’s time as Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic in the 1970s. Ruggles’s small but formidable oeuvre was taped back to back with Gershwin overtures that proved much more than a populist sweetener. Few conductors, save perhaps our own John Wilson, have made comparable efforts to get disparate Americana stylistically and textually right. In the first of MTT’s three recordings of Rhapsody in Blue he directs the Columbia Jazz Band to align with a lightly doctored version of the composer’s own volatile piano roll. Further Gershwin followed, scrupulously sourced, naturally ‘swung’ and from time to time graced by MTT’s own urbane pianism.

Bernstein having ignited the Ives boom on a relatively narrow front, MTT recorded all four symphonies and more at home and abroad, offering smoother professionalism and the latest scholarship. A single San Francisco miscellany with Thomas Hampson and friends, ‘An American Journey’, neatly encapsulates what Ives or MTT’s Ives is all about. RCA, who would shortly pull the plug, had already released two Copland programmes the equal of any in the catalogue, presenting the composer in ‘populist’ and ‘modernist’ guises. We hear more music from Appalachian Spring than is customary elsewhere and, adopting MTT’s own tweaked edition, the Orchestral Variations have unprecedented power and panache.

MTT’s Stravinsky is no less fine though at times disparaged by commentators in thrall to more etiolated renderings. His Symphony in C (with the LSO) is strikingly exuberant while the glorious ‘Stravinsky in America’ (10 pieces actually set down in London) takes in a masterly yet suitably playful Agon. Perséphone (San Francisco) is as persuasive as that distanced melodrama is ever likely to get. The conductor himself singles out Debussy’s Le martyre de Saint-Sébastien, queerer still, as the pinnacle of his discography, the London Symphony Chorus and Orchestra joined by Sylvia McNair, Ann Murray and Nathalie Stutzmann, nowadays making her own name on the podium. Leslie Caron narrates. A peerless line-up is captured in prize-winning sound.

Only one traditional opera, a diaphanous Tosca, made just before the end of Communist rule in Hungary and released simultaneously on the state record label. As its formidable soprano Eva Marton remembers: ‘There was no feeling that this was his first opera recording. He was like a big beautiful albatross with his long graceful arms.’ Not a first choice for Puccini buffs but further confirmation of MTT’s unorthodox, essentially post-Classical focus. What Edward Seckerson in his book of conversations with the conductor, Viva Voce (Faber: 1994), calls ‘insatiable curiosity’ had boundaries too. Looking forward as well as back you can share memories of the conductor on social media using the hashtag #MTT80.