A Personal Remembrance of Michael Tilson Thomas

Nicole Lacroix told me the other night that there was a joke going around staff to the effect that it seems that I have met everyone who’s famous. Well, one person that it seems everyone has met but me is Michael Tilson Thomas. So many people I know have wonderful stories about him. I have none. 

Even several non-musicians I know have met him. Apparently if you lived in San Francisco in the late 90s through the aughts it was impossible NOT to meet him. He was everywhere, a fixture of the community, showing up in cafes, concerts of local musicians of various genres, on a hiking trail in the Presidio, political events. I heard several people refer to him as an unofficial mayor.

I did see him conduct live, though, in two of the most impactful concerts I have ever attended.

I had already moved to the East Coast by the time he assumed the directorship of the San Francisco Symphony in 1995, but leading up to that appointment were frequent guest appearances with the orchestra. In 1989 I saw Thomas lead a re-creation of the marathon 1808 concert at which Beethoven premiered the fifth and sixth symphonies, the fourth piano concerto, a substantial chunk of the Mass in C, and the Choral Fantasy, as well as a concert aria and a solo piano fantasia. The whole thing was almost four hours long and glorious. (Apparently it was much better rehearsed, and performed in a more comfortable and better-heated hall, than the original event.) The program turned out to make more sense than it looks on paper; the cumulative effect of all that music, with the Choral Fantasy as apotheosis, was powerful. Garrick Ohlsson was the pianist. (And no I haven’t met him either.)

In 1991 I saw Thomas conduct Charles Ives’s Symphony no. 4. It’s a masterpiece, but you really need to hear it live for it to make sense. There are spatial effects and harmonic resonances that do not come across on even the best recordings. Ives created a sonic world that needs to be fully inhabited. Thomas preceded the performance with a brief talk that was engaging and immeasurably helped in appreciating the performance. Just before the symphony, immediately leading into its first movement, the chorus sang six traditional American hymns that are quoted in the work. As Thomas pointed out, when Ives quoted them he put them in different modes which brought them closer to non-Western musical languages, thus bringing the music closer to Ives’s goal of universality. Thomas called it the greatest American symphony and compared it to Beethoven’s Ninth, and during those 35 minutes it was easy to believe him.

He was also great on television, perhaps even better than his close friend and mentor Leonard Bernstein, whom I revered but who could occasionally be, as the kids say, a bit cringe. Thomas was never cringe; he always seemed to ask more questions than he claimed to have answers to, taking us along on his journeys while making it clear that he, too, was just a fan like us. He could also be funny, and in his televised performance of Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals where he appeared alongside Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck (who have a hilarious exchange debating the pronunciation of Saint-Saens), Thomas held his own in energy and presence, as animated as the animation.

His career was inspiring and somehow very American. Growing up in Los Angeles he became a musical fixture in the city by his early 20s, working with Igor Stravinsky, participating in wild avant-garde experiments with musicians of different genres, and performing with Los Angeles Philharmonic members and top-flight studio musicians at the storied Monday Evening Concerts at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where new music was regularly featured. When at age 24 he became an assistant conductor for the Boston Symphony, and took over for an ailing William Steinberg mid-concert to enthusiastic acclaim, he seemed headed for a Bernstein-like trajectory of instant massive success. But while he guest conducted all over the place, including taking over the NY Phil’s Young People’s Concerts from Bernstein, Thomas settled into his position at the relatively unassuming Buffalo Philharmonic, where he made well-received recordings and used it as a laboratory for his own ideas of what an orchestra could be. But by his mid-thirties (the end of the seventies), and struggling with personal issues, he seemed to run out of road. 

But after a couple of years he got it together and found new worlds to conquer, becoming the principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic before becoming principal conductor of the London Symphony. Dedicated to fostering the careers of musicians in that treacherous time just after college, he founded the New World Symphony in Florida and co-founded (with Bernstein, just months before his death in 1990) the Pacific Music Festival in Japan, which both remain excellent training ground for professional musicians.

In 1995 took over the San Francisco Symphony, which he threw himself into in a way he couldn’t with Buffalo or London. San Francisco became his home and the orchestra became an expression of his artistic beliefs. He stayed for 25 years, with a legacy of great performances and recordings. Things started to sour in his final decade there, as his progressive musical vision wasn’t progressive enough for the local musical community, and there were increasing financial pressures and labor disputes. But Thomas never flagged in his work and outlook, turning to composing and producing a series of performances celebrating his grandparents’ careers as Yiddish theater performers. 

He handled his final years and devastating diagnosis with dignity and grace, and he seemed to spend his dying years actually living.

I never met him, but as with all great artists, I didn’t really need to in order to be enriched by his spirit. (And in any case actually meeting famous people is overrated.)