Michael Tilson Thomas, award-winning conductor and composer, dies aged 81 | Classical music

Michael Tilson Thomas, a prominent American conductor who composed music and led orchestras in Buffalo, Miami, London and San Francisco for half a century, died Wednesday. He was 81 years old.

Tilson Thomas He underwent brain tumor surgery in 2021 and continued his career, after which the tumor died in February 2025. He was back. Spokesperson Connie Shuman said that he gave his last concert with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in April 2025 and died at his home in San Francisco.

Tilson Thomas has received 39 Grammy award nominations, winning 12, and was a 2019 Kennedy Center Honoree.

“It’s meant to contain a variety of interesting and compelling, questioning things that you’ll hear the first time you listen to it,” he said of classical music in a 2004 interview with the Associated Press. “But by nature he keeps so many other secrets, or so many other perspectives, much closer to his chest, and it’s only when you listen to them over and over again that you start to realize they exist.”

Tilson Thomas was born in Los Angeles on December 21, 1944, into an artistic family. His father, Ted, was a producer at the Mercury Theater Company in New York and later worked in the film and television industry in Los Angeles. His mother, Roberta, was heading the investigation for Columbia Pictures. His grandparents, Bessie and Boris Thomashefsky, were pioneers of American Yiddish theatre.

He played piano at a young age and attended the University of Southern California. When he received his diploma in 1967, he had studied with Pierre Boulez, Aaron Copland, Igor Stravinsky and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

“I don’t use the word genius lightly, but I throw it around about Michael. He reminds me of me at that age, except he knows more than I do,” conductor Leonard Bernstein told the New York Times Magazine for a 1971 profile. “Not just music, but things like brain functions, cerebrology, physics, biochemistry.”

Tilson Thomas was co-musical director and then music director of the Ojai festival in California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He assisted at Germany’s Bayreuth festival in 1966, won the Koussevitzky award at the Tanglewood Music Center in 1968, and became assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1969.

Tilson Thomas made his New York debut at the Lincoln Center Philharmonic Hall on October 22, 1969, as a mid-concert replacement for the ill William Steinberg. Tilson Thomas conducted Robert Starer’s Concerto for Violin, Cello and Orchestra and Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel.

“A tall, lean young man took the stage with an air of tremendous confidence and authority and showed that his self-confidence was not misplaced,” critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote in the Times. “He approaches this music naturally, as one would expect from a Tanglewood graduate and a student of Pierre Boulez.”

Tilson Thomas was principal guest conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1972 to 1974, music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic from 1971 to 1979, and principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1981 to 1985.

He helped find Miami’s New World Symphony He was appointed in 1987 and served as artistic director until 2021. He served as principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra between 1988 and 1995, and as music director of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra between 1995 and 2020.

Tilson Thomas’ compositions include Grace (1988), Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind (2015-16) and Meditations on Rilke (2019).

Her husband, Joshua Robison, died on February 22 while trying to recover from a fall last August. They met while playing in the orchestra of a North Hollywood middle school (since renamed Walter Reed Middle School), became partners in 1976, and married in 2014.

while announcing his last concert At a belated 80th birthday celebration that will take place in San Francisco on April 26, 2025, Thomas released a statement acknowledging his death.

“At this point we’re all going to say, in the old show business parlance, ‘This is over,'” he said. “A coda is a musical element that appears at the end of a composition and brings the entire piece to its conclusion. The length of a coda can vary greatly. The coda of my life is generous and rich.”