GRAMOPHONE: Michael Tilson Thomas – A Personal Tribute

Like many avid record collectors my first awareness of Michael Tilson Thomas were the Deutsche Grammophon recordings which arrived in the wake of his appointment as assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the age of just 24. As recipient of the Koussevitsky Prize in 1969 it was almost a foregone conclusion. The word ‘auspicious’ didn’t even begin to cover it.

One of those DG discs – a sensational pairing of Ives, Ruggles, and Piston (start as you mean to go on) – was tantamount to a personal manifesto: a commitment to American music that would stretch across his career and peak during his later years in San Francisco. The other DG disc was a luminous performance of Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony ‘Winter Daydreams’, rarely performed at the time and an interesting (even bold) choice for one so young. But it spoke of his family’s Russian roots and opened up a shared passion with myself for Tchaikovsky’s music. A subsequent recording (for Sony) of the Third Suite (again a fabulous piece rarely performed or recorded) with the Los Angeles Philharmonic put us in the same room together for the first time.

My interviewee was elegant, boyish, and extraordinarily articulate. What was even more striking was the originality of his thinking. We talked of Tchaikovsky at length and I especially remember him referring to the great composer as ‘the Verdi of Russian music’ meaning, as he went on to explain, he might be treated with refinement or simply rolled out (no names mentioned) with brash exuberance. In other words he had completely grasped the concept of passion contained within a classical framework. It was a stimulating exchange. And there was something else of more significance that came out of this first encounter – the folk origins of all Russian music. His father’s side of the Thomashefsky family came from a long line of singers and cantors and it totally coloured his way with this music. Even Stravinsky – a composer with whom MTT was a natural bedfellow – revelled in that heritage. I remember him characterising The Rite of Spring as primitive rock music. No question that some of MTT’s finest recordings are of Russian repertoire. A thrilling Prokofiev 5 (my first choice in a BBC Building a Library) and a magnificent complete Tchaikovsky Swan Lake with the London Symphony Orchestra among them.

So it was around the time of his appointment to the LSO as Principal Conductor that a proposal was made to the publisher Faber and Faber for a book of conversations between myself and MTT. It was the culmination of various encounters between us including an audio CD put out by Sony in which we discussed Mahler’s Third Symphony. And so followed a period of unfettered access to MTT – many, many private hours talking music and music making, watching him prepare, perusing his precisely annotated scores, observing rehearsals, listening to his theorising and philosophising. His erudition was exceptional – but equally he was always receptive to alternative viewpoints. Eternally inquisitive.

His mentor and sometime teacher Leonard Bernstein is a significant presence in the book (which was entitled VIVA VOCE – not my choice, I hasten to add) and it goes without saying that in some respects Lenny was the composer (to say nothing of the conductor) MTT wanted to be. But he certainly celebrated his music – not least the theatre stuff (which you might say was in part a throwback to a childhood full of both Broadway and Yiddish theatre songs – his father took piano lessons from George Gershwin!) – and perhaps the occasion on which we most bonded was in 1993 when he presided over a semi-staged performance and recording of Bernstein’s first Broadway show On the Town. Apart from Tyne Daly as Hildy the casting was in the Lenny mould of operatic crossover (which I has issues with but kept to myself) but what was astounding, though not perhaps surprising given the orchestra’s Bernstein pedigree, was the LSO’s sensationally idiomatic playing in the work’s eight virtuosic dance episodes. I’ve always thought this a landmark show. MTT did too and on opening night he was quite emotional. Speaking of Bernstein, I only wish I could have seen him conduct MASS (he did so in San Francisco) – the masterpiece I continue to obsess about and which we discussed at length.

Mention Bernstein, of course, and you think Mahler. And so it was with MTT. The symphony cycle was recorded in its entirety in San Francisco but the memorable Eighth he did with the LSO at the Albert Hall (again echoing Bernstein) – prompted one of our most memorable exchanges. That moment in the Chorus Mysticus where horns and trombones blare out the tremulous melody Gretchen sings earlier to the words ‘My first beloved, now no longer troubled, comes back’. In effect Mahler is saying that the love between two people is ultimately as important as the entire universe. MTT believed that this was truly what the whole piece was about. So did I. You could say it was a eureka moment for both of us. Perhaps he was more objective about Mahler than some (like Bernstein) but that didn’t make his readings less personal.

Speaking of Mahler’s entire universe prompts me to think of Charles Ives’ Fourth Symphony on which there was no greater authority than MTT. In 1987 he founded his New World Symphony Orchestra and in an old movie theatre in Miami Beach he played out his dream of collecting together budding young professional musicians and offering them their first communal experience of rehearsing and playing great works. The Ives 4 – I casually dubbed it ‘Starship America’ – was one, but as extraordinary as the performance itself was, his spontaneous analysis of the piece spoken to me on the terrace of his Miami apartment was something else. It’s in the book if you can find it.

MTT’s musical families were few – he guest conducted comparatively little preferring the deeper satisfaction of long term relationships. Like his own with Joshua Robison who passed on just before Michael as if it had been planned that way all along.

For me MTT represented a near-perfect balance of intellectual rigour and impassioned spontaneity. He often spoke of that elusive concept of striving at all times to be ‘in the moment’. More importantly of sharing the moment. Those moments, be they spoken, sung or played, will continue to resonate.

Michael Tilson Thomas · December 21, 1944 – April 22, 2026