PERSPECTIVE — As a student at the USC School of Music, he was known as Mike Thomas. A little later, when he arrived in Boston, it was Michael Thomas. Concurrently, in print, on recordings, and on television, he used his full formal name, Michael Tilson Thomas. To Margaret Carson, his savvy press agent, he was Michael TT.
By the time he got to the San Francisco Symphony, the name was conveniently shortened to his catchy, marketable initials, MTT. Many just called him Maestro. A star-struck participant in a panel discussion at Davies Symphony Hall even said he was “our Elvis.”
To me, though, he was simply Michael. I’m sure that I’m not alone.
See, Michael Tilson Thomas, who died at 81 on April 22 after a nearly five-year-long battle with glioblastoma, never struck me as an august, domineering, all-knowing authority figure — once the usual stereotype for a conductor. He came off more like an eager, talkative, occasionally reckless, yet ultimately wise older brother who was a born teacher without portfolio.
To put it succinctly, Michael never really grew up. And a good thing it was, for he took us on a ceaseless adventure through known and unknown portals of the world of music, always exuding childlike enthusiasm and wonder for whatever came along the way.
At a Juilliard commencement speech in 2022, MTT’s catchphrase in advising young graduates was “going the distance” — a term borrowed from baseball (a pitcher throwing a complete nine-inning game) — his prescription for a long, fulfilling career in music. MTT certainly set an outstanding example of that — first as a pianist, then as a conductor, a thinker, a Pied Piper full of provocative ideas, an educator, belatedly as a composer, and, finally, as an inspirational survivor who bravely managed to keep on making music while fighting a deadly disease.
My first meeting with Michael dates back to June 1982, a year after he was appointed as a co-principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic (the other co-principal was the young Simon Rattle) as a backstop when it became clear that then-music director Carlo Maria Giulini couldn’t carry a full load of concerts. I met him for an interview for the Los Angeles Daily News at the Sportsmen’s Lodge in Studio City, just two miles south from the North Hollywood neighborhood where he grew up. Michael was lounging poolside alone — no publicity person on guard, no entourage. It was summer, the weather was hot, yet he wasn’t bothered at all; indeed, he said he liked temperatures above 100 degrees in which he claimed to feel a new kind of “energy.” Not being a hot-weather person, I found that comment kind of weird but managed to get him up to his hotel room (No. 401), where it was cooler.
There, I got a full dose of the MTT treatment. The interview turned into a two-hour didactic monologue that wandered all over the place, that unique mind shooting out ideas at a dizzying clip. He protested that he didn’t want to talk about George Gershwin or Charles Ives — two American composers whom he was fervently championing — and then, without prompting, he proceeded to talk about George Gershwin and Charles Ives at great length. He was in the middle of writing liner notes for a new recording of Ives’ Second Symphony and seemed to be thinking out loud to me as to what to write. At one point, he veered completely off-topic and mused about quitting music and becoming a paramedic since this troubled world needed more paramedics than conductors!
Michael started using the Socratic method, asking me, the interviewer, questions about music and firing back in the spirit of debate. Toward the end of our session, he got on his feet and began pacing back and forth furiously, declaring that the authentic-instrument movement was useless, using the impossibility of reproducing the sound of the Duke Ellington band as an example. He even sang “Satin Doll” (“Da, da-da, da, da, (pause) daaah da da” …) and shouted, “Forget it!”
It was quite a performance.
There were many more such private performances to come over the years. One memorable August morning in 1983, I had just finished interviewing Leonard Bernstein during a break between rehearsals in a Hollywood Bowl dressing room (at the last minute, Michael had talked Lenny into seeing me — long story). As Bernstein left the room, Michael burst in. “Rick, I have finally figured out what the Philharmonic Institute (which he directed that summer) is all about,” he exclaimed, and he proceeded to pontificate into my cassette recorder for about half an hour. Another time, when I was visiting backstage at the Barbican after a London Symphony concert in 1990, Michael poked his head out of his dressing room, spotted me, and shouted, “Hey Rick! I’ve just discovered Bruckner!”
All of these and more were examples of what Michael’s mission was all his performing life. His curiosity and uncontrollable urge to share what he had discovered never quit, always delivered in a voice that sounded barely removed from the boyish wunderkind who dazzled and sometimes pissed off admiring or envious colleagues and friends in Southern California.
Michael wanted everyone to join in on his adventures — even critics. When he was running the Phil’s Institute — which was set up as a West Coast Tanglewood — one of his brainstorms was the Collegium Musicum, in which he would periodically lead all the musicians and conductors at the Institute in choral music as an affirmation of community. He spotted me in the room taking notes and ordered me by name to come on up and sing with the rest of the kids, not caring for a minute whether or not I could even sing! Determining that refusal was not permitted, I joined in, trying to sightread music by J. S. Bach and Ives. At the next Collegium Musicum, he did it again.
When Michael was an LA Phil principal guest conductor during this period, he went wild conceiving and uncorking enterprising special events like the Festival of Music Made in Los Angeles at Royce Hall, or a wide-ranging pre-season Stravinsky Festival at Hollywood Bowl in honor of the former-LA resident’s centenary. Some thought Michael was in the running to succeed Giulini when the latter resigned and went home to Italy, never to return. But he ran afoul of the Phil’s authoritarian boss Ernest Fleischmann, who in 1985 let him go while keeping Rattle.
I was present at Michael’s notorious 1985 Mahler Eighth Symphony concert at the Bowl in which a rogue police helicopter planted its noisy self over the amphitheater at precisely the wrong time in the piece for over half an hour. Michael couldn’t take it anymore. He yelled “Basta cosi!,” snapped his baton in two, and angrily stalked off to the wings. He came back onstage only after the orchestra threatened to charge the LAPD overtime for 250 musicians and singers, thus chasing away the copter! What is little known is that five nights later, with nothing to lose, he did it again, this time walking out when aircraft drowned out his performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth with the Institute Orchestra. I thought then and still do now that, after years of enduring nasty air bombardments at the Bowl, his walkouts were cathartic acts in the defense of music.
Following these concerts, Michael didn’t return to his hometown orchestra for nearly two decades, coming back as a guest only when Fleischmann was safely retired and Disney Hall was up and running. But in the interim, Michael landed on his feet at the London Symphony and transcended his LA Phil Institute experience by co-founding the New World Center in Miami Beach. In the following decade, he found a new home with the San Francisco Symphony, where he finally blossomed to his full stature as a world-class conductor in a city that treated him and his indispensable manager and husband, Joshua Robison, like rock stars.
Jump ahead to Oct. 2014, and off I went to San Francisco to interview Michael in his suite in Davies Symphony Hall for Gramophone two months before his 70th birthday. This was a somewhat graver, more serious, and settled Michael at first glance, but as we got into the talk, the animated, ever-youthful Michael of three decades past began to resurface — and it was like old times again.
His conversation still had that darting quality with ideas that could shoot in all directions, but it was now more focused and cogent. We talked mostly about the past, going into a thorough roundup of nearly 50 years of his recordings, and although he admitted that new ideas were getting more difficult to come by, he could still spin them out by the dozens.
But this time, for the first time in my experiences with him, Michael was beginning to feel fatigued. “I’m running out of gas,” he confessed, but I managed to slip in one more question. Quoting Paul Simon from his song “Old Friends,” I asked Michael, is it terribly strange to be 70?
“Nope. I don’t find it strange,” he said. “I’m feeling kind of liberated by the whole experience. It amuses me to reflect that a great deal of my life — certainly my first, most impressionable experiences in the classical-music world –— where I was the youngest person onstage for quite a long time (chuckle). Now very often, I’m the oldest person onstage, especially in Europe I am. But funnily enough, I still feel very much like the same person. I know there are members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic who know me still from way, way back who said to me, or gotten the message to me, `Well you know, Michael is exactly the same as he was. It’s just that he’s gotten a lot better at knowing how to achieve the results he’s after.’ I very much appreciate that.”
Then his voice got slower, possibly due to fatigue, or perhaps in awe of his long journey through the ups and downs of a musical life like no other. “I do feel sort of the same gleam,” he went on, “the same sparkle, the same presence of wondrousness of music in my life, and it is my greatest joy to be able to get to that place with my colleagues as part of this extraordinary thing that we are still doing, this great tradition that we are carrying forward.”
So long, Michael. It was a real blast having you on this planet.
