Michael Tilson Thomas returned to finish a Mahler symphony twenty-two years later
In 1985 a police helicopter roared over the Hollywood Bowl during Mahler's Eighth Symphony, and Michael Tilson Thomas walked off the stage. In 2007 he came back to the same venue to lead the same symphony with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and began by asking the audience where they had left off.
Humour and nerve ran through his career. Born in Los Angeles on December 21, 1944, he was the grandson of Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, stars of New York's Yiddish theatre, and came from a long line of performers and cantors. The architect Frank Gehry sometimes babysat him. At 24 he became internationally known when he took over a Boston Symphony concert midway through after William Steinberg fell ill, having just been named the orchestra's assistant conductor after winning the Koussevitzky Prize at Tanglewood.
He led the Buffalo Philharmonic through the 1970s and the London Symphony Orchestra from 1988 to 1995, then took charge in San Francisco in 1995, the 11th person to lead its symphony, staying until 2020. There he planted American music on almost every programme of his first season and recorded all nine Mahler symphonies on the orchestra's own label. He was the first to record certain works by Aaron Copland, Charles Ives and Steve Reich, and was once struck so hard by James Brown's Cold Sweat on the car radio that he pulled over, crediting it with shaping his sense of rhythm.
Teaching mattered as much as performing. He founded the New World Symphony in Miami Beach in 1987 as a training orchestra for gifted graduates, and helped develop its Gehry-designed home. In 2009 he helped build the YouTube Symphony Orchestra from more than 3,000 video auditions across 30 countries. He hosted the Keeping Score series on PBS, appeared with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck in a 1976 television special and conducted Enter Sandman with Metallica.
In 2021 he revealed he had glioblastoma. His husband Joshua Robison, whom he had first met in a junior high orchestra, died in February 2026, and Thomas died at home in San Francisco on April 22, 2026, aged 81.
Source: Michael Tilson Thomas
