Chicago Classical Review

Michael Tilson Thomas died Wednesday at his home in the San Francisco Bay area. Artistic director laureate of the New World Symphony and former music director laureate of the San Francisco Symphony, Tilson Thomas was one of the world’s most distinguished conductors. Through his work as conductor and educator with the Miami Beach-based orchestral academy over a 35-year period, he has left an indelible mark on South Florida’s cultural landscape.

Tilson Thomas enjoyed a half-century relationship with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He first conducted the CSO at Ravinia in 1970; following his Orchestra Hall debut in 1981, he returned to lead the CSO every two or three seasons until his final appearance in 2023. He shared podium duties with Sir Georg Solti on a 1988 tour to Australia and recorded Charles Ives’ complete symphonies with the CSO (Sony), his only Chicago recordings.

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A native of Los Angeles, Tilson Thomas was born in 1944 to a storied artistic family. Ted Thomas, his father, was a producer with Orson Welles and John Houseman’s legendary Mercury Theater company while his mother Roberta Thomas was head of research for Columbia Pictures. Tilson Thomas’ grandparents were Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, famed actor-producers of Yiddish theater in the last years of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th. Tilson Thomas’ musical play The Thomashevskys dramatized their turbulent relationship and theatrical triumphs featuring excerpts from many of the scores for their original productions. It was twice presented by the New World Symphony with the 2011 iteration filmed for the PBS Great Performances series (as well as iterations in New York, San Francisco and Tanglewood).

Tilson Thomas studied composition at the University of Southern California with Ingolf Dahl. He was piano accompanist and conductor for the masterclasses of Jascha Heifetz and Gregor Piatagorsky. A talented oboist, he played in ensembles at the famous Monday Evening Concerts’ contemporary music programs under the direction of such creative luminaries as Igor Stravinsky, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and Aaron Copland. At Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home and educational music center, the young Tilson Thomas studied with Erich Leinsdorf and assisted Leonard Bernstein in a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”).

In the fall of 1969, Tilson Thomas became assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Shortly thereafter, he was catapulted into the national spotlight when he took over for the ailing William Steinberg in mid-concert at New York’s Lincoln Center. (Steinberg suffered a heart attack while on the podium during the program’s first half.) Due to Steinberg’s illness, Tilson Thomas helmed much of the Boston season and the summer Tanglewood programs with his first commercial recordings, leading the BSO following.

He took over the New York Philharmonic’s televised Young People’s Concerts from Leonard Bernstein in the early 1970’s. Appointments as music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic (1971-1979) and principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic (1981-1985) drew national attention to Tilson Thomas’ highly diverse programming and podium skills. A recording with the Buffalo ensemble of the complete orchestral scores of pioneering American experimental composer Carl Ruggles was highly acclaimed and has achieved classic status over the decades since it was initially issued.

It was on tour with the Los Angeles orchestra that Tilson Thomas made his first Miami appearance in the early 1980’s. Appropriately on that occasion, he led Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. The symphonies of Mahler became a signature of Tilson Thomas’ repertoire (much as they were for Bernstein). He was principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra from 1988 to 1995 and maintained an ongoing relationship with that ensemble in the ensuing years.

In 1995, the San Francisco Symphony would become his major podium home. Tilson Thomas was music director of the Bay City orchestra through 2020, raising the ensemble’s playing to a new level. An acclaimed PBS series “Keeping Score” and many numerous Grammy winning recordings and US and European tours left an important legacy from his California tenure

While opera occupied a relatively minor part of Tilson Thomas’ career, his sporadic excursions into the genre were significant. In 1979 at Santa Fe Opera, he conducted the first American production (and only the second production anywhere) of Alban Berg’s Lulu with the unfinished third act completed by Friedrich Cerha. Tilson Thomas led director Frank Corsaro’s staging of Leoš Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen at New York City Opera which proved to be one of the major triumphs of soprano Beverly Sills’ controversial tenure as general director. At Lyric Opera of Chicago, Tilson Thomas took the podium for Puccini’s La Bohéme and Tosca in the late 1980’s.

In 1987 Tilson Thomas co-founded (along with Lin and Ted Arison of Carnival Cruise lines) the New World Symphony, an orchestral academy for aspiring orchestral and chamber players. Composed of top graduates of the country’s leading conservatories and music schools, the program offers three-year fellowships and an intensive course in orchestral performance skills. Over 1300 fellows have passed through the NWS and many now hold positions in major ensembles and school faculties around the globe.

The New World’s first concert in February, 1988 at downtown Miami’s Gusman Cultural Center, was far from perfect but the sheer energy of the youthful players and the mastery of Tilson Thomas’ leadership still produced memorable traversals of works by Brahms, Charles Wuorinen, Bartók and Beethoven. The Lincoln Theater, a renovated cinema on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach, would become the academy’s first home. Although adequate for chamber music concerts, the venue’s problematic acoustic was a regular issue.

Despite the aural inadequacies, Tilson Thomas led many distinguished performances and his mentorship of the group’s conducting fellows has enriched the talent pool of podium aspirants. With the opening of the New World Center in 2011, Tilson Thomas’ vision for the academy was finally fulfilled. Custom designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry, the campus’ fulcrum is a 756-seat auditorium with superb acoustics. The complex includes multiple rehearsal rooms, spaces for cultural exhibits, a recording studio and a rooftop garden space. The adjoining Soundscape Park is utilized for wallcasts with selected performances projected with surround sound to large throngs in the park and streamed over the internet to a worldwide audience..

As greater cooperation of music schools was achieved, the level of playing rose exponentially over the decades. By the time of the opening of the orchestra’s new home and the concert hall at the Arsht Center in downtown Miami, on the right night, the New World could hold its own with the country’s best orchestras. A 2015 performance of Aaron Copland’s Symphony No. 3 (at the Arsht Center) could scarcely have been bettered. A work that can sound bloated in less skilled hands emerged as “the great American symphony” that conductor Serge Koussevitzky proclaimed.

Tilson Thomas’ temperament could prove, at times, volatile. During a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, he threw down his baton and stomped off stage due to persistent audience noise and coughing. On another occasion, a woman with a child was sitting in the seats behind the orchestra at the New World Center. He told her to leave because she was distracting him, even though they were not making noise or disrupting the concert. (The organization eventually apologized and offered the patron free tickets to a future concert.) One night at the Arsht, he lectured the audience when he thought a cell phone had gone off.. In fact, the sound was coming from backstage. While conducting Mahler’s Ninth Symphony with the CSO in 2013, he tossed handfuls of cough lozenges into the audience after a spell of intrusive coughing.

On the other hand, Tilson Thomas could prove deft at handling problems in the ensemble during a performance or leading inexperienced players. When a horn player fumbled his entrance at the outset of a performance of Schubert’s Symphony No. 9, without stopping, Tilson Thomas re-cued the player. This time his articulation was spot on. Those audience members who did not know the work probably were not aware that anything had gone wrong. At a 2019 Viola Visions festival, he led a mass ensemble of student violists, drawing luminous textures and tight ensemble in the premiere of a new score by New World alum Nils Bultmann with minimal rehearsal.

Tilson Thomas has been a vital advocate for such contemporary American creative icons as John Adams and Steve Reich as well as pioneering native modernists Charles Ives and Carl Ruggles. A blazing reading of Adams’ Harmonielehre remains etched in the mind’s ear. Two performances of Italian avant-gardist Luciano Berio’s Folk Songs featured sopranos of widely different vocal spheres, Roberta Alexander and Lauren Flanagan, both excellent in their unique styles.

Above all, it was the music of Gustav Mahler that brought out the conductor’s mastery. Tilson Thomas’ many New World Mahler performances cut deep into the composer’s agonized spirit, by turns bucolic, passionate, incendiary and uplifting. Most memorable was a searing 2018 traversal of the Symphony No. 9, the composer’s final completed score.

In August, 2021, Tilson Thomas revealed that he had been diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, an especially aggressive form of brain cancer. He underwent surgery, followed by a full regimen of radiation and chemotherapy. Via Zoom linkups, he coached New World fellows in the fall and oversaw rehearsals. He had been scheduled to return for a series of concerts in February, 2022 but cancelled those appearances. In March, Tilson Thomas resigned from his NWS position but was given the honorary title of “artistic director laureate.” He returned to the Miami Beach podium in May, leading a deeply moving reading of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. A standing ovation greeted his initial appearance and, following the performance, he thanked the audience and players for their support. The auditorium of the New World Center was rechristened the “Michael Tilson Thomas Performance Hall.”

While Tilson Thomas conducted several European orchestras in the spring and early summer of 2023, his September concert at New World was conducted by Andrew Grams after doctors advised Tilson Thomas not to travel. Following a San Francisco Beethoven 9^th Symphony, he cancelled performances with the National Symphony of Washington, DC and the Toronto Symphony. He did lead performances with the Chicago Symphony, an orchestra he had regularly guested with, in late November and early December.

Tilson Thomas returned to the New World in March, 2024, leading authoritative readings of Tchaikovsky and Schumann symphonies, seemingly rejuvenated. When he again took the podium in May, however, he appeared pale and drawn. While he still conducted standing, Tilson Thomas did not take any curtain calls throughout the concert. Obviously, problems with his stamina had taken hold. Still, he directed an unforgettable performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15, a work that holds many parallels with the symphonies of Mahler.

His farewell New World concert in March, 2025 featured a superb performance of Beethoven’s perennial Fifth Symphony that fused European warmth with structural rigor. (The symphony had concluded the orchestral academy’s debut concert in 1988.) An encore of Grieg’s The Last Spring was exquisitely rendered and was repeated at the players’ request. A month later, Tilson Thomas conducted part of a tribute concert with the San Francisco Symphony, his final podium appearance. His longtime manager and life partner Joshua Robison died earlier this year.

New World Symphony president and CEO Howard Herring said, in a statement, “Michael Tilson Thomas was a master at wrestling a dream into reality – of mastering a piece of music, of building a career, at establishing an institution.” Artistic director Stéphane Denève commented “Music has lost a guiding light. He dedicated his life to inspire others and changed the lives of many.”

Tilson Thomas has left an impressive legacy on the global musical horizon through his many recordings, public television programs and concerts across continents and time zones. For South Florida, the gift of the New World Symphony and its path-breaking, world-class hall and campus have changed the area’s cultural life. Michael Tilson Thomas was one of America’s truly great artists.

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