By
Published: Monday, 06 January 2025 at 09:30 AM
Michael Tilson Thomas: why a terminal cancer diagnosis won’t stop me from conducting
Read on to discover all about celebrated US conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, who continues make make incredible music wile living with brain cancer…
Who is Michael Tilson Thomas?
Some musicians seem incapable of ageing; and until quite recently a prime example was that most articulate, engaging and all-round alive of conductors Michael Tilson Thomas.
Decades passed and, with them, orchestras: the London Symphony, which he directed in the 1980s/90s; then the San Francisco Symphony, which he ran from the mid-90s through to 2020. Eras changed. But MTT, as people call him, somehow didn’t. He held onto a mercurially boyish grace and elegance – until, in 2022, news broke that he’d contracted a particularly cruel and aggressive kind of brain cancer.
Michael Tilson Thomas… working with cancer ‘gives me a certain focus’
Since then, the music world has watched and waited; and for MTT himself it’s been, to say the least, an anxious time. But December 2024 brought his 80th birthday. He’s still here, still working, though to a restricted schedule. He has concerts – handpicked for what he calls a ‘gentler, quieter calendar’ – booked through to spring 2025. And from the emotionally charged Mahler 2 he conducted at London’s Barbican in October 2024 – pushing aside the chair that had been placed on the podium, and standing for the entire 90 minutes – he can still deliver. Fragile but defiant.
When I ask about his health he says, after a pause, ‘There are a lot of different opinions about that. I have energy, optimism, perspective. It’s only when well-meaning people are so concerned about my welfare that I can’t operate in the way I’m used to. It’s frustrating when I want to rehearse for a number of hours, and they say: “Oh, that might be too strenuous.” I say: “Let me do my work. If it’s too much, I will tell you.”
‘That aside, my situation gives me a certain focus. When I’m asked to do things, I want to know how much actual music-making is involved rather than organisation or promotion. I want everything to be musical.’
Michael Tilson Thomas, the composer
And occupying much of the focus right now is his own music which, although it’s generally been in the shadows of his life as a conductor, has accumulated over 40-or-more years into a serious if slowly emerging output: many of the scores are still works in progress. That the music isn’t widely known hasn’t discouraged him.
‘When Mahler wanted to be buried out in a suburban cemetery rather than the central Viennese one, and people asked why, he said: “Those who love me will know where to find me, for anyone else it doesn’t matter.” In my case, many of these pieces are quite personal, soliloquies for playing in a dark chamber at night, and usually written for a particular performer. But some people are quite devoted to them, and when they tell me so, I’m pleased.’
Grace: a new collection of music by Michael Tilson Thomas
And finding Tilson Thomas the composer has just become considerably easier with the release of four albums on the Pentatone label, stylishly put together with a book of photos from his life and looking very much like a legacy statement. It’s collectively called Grace, after one of his song settings, first written as a birthday tribute to one of his chief mentors, Leonard Bernstein. And with a self-deprecating lightness that masks the importance to him of this project, he talks about it as ‘an opportunity I felt the need to take before I’m out of here. After experiences where I’ve had to question my mortality more seriously than before, there are some messages to the world I’d like to get right. It’s a step in that direction.’
Michael Tilson Thomas… the early years
That the messages are often autobiographical is no accident. And looking through the photos in the Grace release, you get a sense of a charmed life well lived from the start – born 1944 into an intellectually curious, Jewish-theatre dynasty on the American west coast, and growing up among the European emigrés (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Korngold…) who had turned postwar Los Angeles into a starry cultural melting-pot.
Taking on the Boston Symphony… a baptism of fire
Prodigious talent catapulted MTT into exalted circles. By his early 20s he was conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra, initially as an assistant to the BSO’s formidable music director William Steinberg, but then thrust into prominence when Steinberg was taken ill and Tilson Thomas found himself in charge of the remaining season: 37 concerts in succession.
As baptisms of fire go, it was extreme. And from the photographic evidence, he looks so very young and wide-eyed to be dealing with it. What, I wondered, does he see now when he looks back at these pictures from the past?
‘I see a young man completely filled with love and energy for music and the people who make it,’ he says. ‘And I very much connect with him – as I do with people who have that spirit whatever their age. Over the years I respect more and more the veteran musicians who’ve been around a long time, frustrated or disappointed by what they’ve experienced on the conveyor belt of concert giving but, in spite of everything, holding onto their first inspiration. It may not be up front and centre all the time, but it’s tucked away and can be accessed. That’s important.’
Pressed about the Herculean challenge of those Boston times, trying to master a relentless flow of new work under heavy public scrutiny and the risk of being eaten alive by seasoned players, he gives a cautious reply: ‘I was more confident in some repertory than others, but that’s how you learn. And I wasn’t eaten alive. Sometimes, if you’re having a difficult time, you realise it’s not you people are having difficulty with: something about the situation raises other issues they have. You have to get past that.
The art of getting on with orchestras
‘I had a nice experience recently with the New York Philharmonic, an orchestra I worked with a lot in my early twenties, and I said to them: “It’s such a joy to come back to you after a long time because, back then, there was so much I wanted to share with you but didn’t know enough to make things as clear and graspable as I wished. Now I think I can be much more helpful.”
‘They replied: “We always knew you had the vision, but you were searching. Now you know how, let’s get it done.” And we did. That a fair number of my colleagues are still pleased I’ve turned up and can break into that certain space of making music always makes me proud.’
Relationship with players has been one of MTT’s great gifts. He makes a point of knowing everybody’s name. He doesn’t grandstand. And his people skills developed through the 1970s when he took what seemed like a step back from the whirlwinds of Boston and New York to become music director of the not so front-line Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. It gave him time and space to work out how to build trust, with the affably relaxed and non-tyrannical didacticism that is arguably his trademark.
Michael Tilson Thomas… a commitment to education and the New World Symphony
He likes telling stories – in performance, in rehearsal. And some inner-educator in his psyche lies behind his founding of what’s now become a model for all training orchestras, the New World Symphony. Like so much about MTT and how he operates, it has a laid-back, semi-showbiz glamour – based in a Frank Gehry building by the seafront on Miami Beach. But at the same time it’s serious, substantial. His involvement lasted 34 years, 1987 until 2022. And it’s perhaps the project that defines his life – more even than the LSO and San Francisco connections, which are also beyond significant.
MTT on opera conducting
Surprisingly, given a family background in the theatre, one core area of music that he hasn’t had significant connections with is opera. And although he clearly likes to work with singers, he’s impatient with the process.
‘Opera takes a lot of time,’ he says. ‘And I’ve sometimes been in the middle of rehearsing a big opera production and had to say: “Can someone tell me who’s in charge here?” There’s a bunch of people walking around and I’m wondering what we’re meant to be accomplishing: is it musical, dramatic, some intricacy of lighting? Sometimes people can’t tell you. They don’t know. And though I try to retain a sense of humour about it – because I’ve always been able to retreat into that grateful and bemused place – it’s not easy.’
Michael Tilson Thomas’s favourite composers… and Mahler
Easier by far is staying where he feels on surer ground: orchestral repertoire. He’s always had a wider range than he gets credit for, but with a special focus on the broadly modern – from Debussy, Berg and Mahler to Adams, Ives and (naturally) Bernstein. Of them all, his Mahler stands out. And there was peculiar poignancy about his choice of Mahler 2, the ‘Resurrection’ Symphony, for his perhaps farewell appearance with the LSO the other month: a piece that stares death in the face and looks beyond it.
Michael Tilson Thomas… there is still work to do
MTT is not especially religious, but he tells me he believes in God – a belief that has ‘probably’ intensified of late – and that his illness prompts a combination of rage and acceptance: ‘From time to time it’s one or the other. Like Walt Whitman said, I’m both in and out of the game.’
Meanwhile, and more practically, ‘there are a few big pieces I want to get finished before it’s too late. Pieces I’ve been thinking about for a long time. One is called For the Fallen: a collection of orchestral portraits of people who have passed but who I remember with gratitude for what they brought to me and to others. I’m hoping next year it will be done: that’s something to aim for. And I can tell you, it will be memorable.