Michael Tilson Thomas, the charismatic conductor and composer who won 12 Grammy Awards and headed the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra for 25 years, the London Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, has died. He was 81 years old.
Tilson Thomas died Wednesday at his home in San Francisco from glioblastoma, he announced on his website. He underwent brain surgery to remove a tumor in 2021 after being diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, and the tumor was announced to have returned in February 2025.
Two months later, he conducted his final concert with the San Francisco Symphony.
Pianist and Lord West Side Story Composer Leonard Bernstein, Tilson Thomas was known for his energetic interpretations of Austria’s Gustav Mahler. He specialized in music from Russia and worked on Americans George Gershwin and Aaron Copland as well.
The 2010 National Medal of Arts winner and 2019 Kennedy Center Laureate was also known as the bad boy of classical music, once leaving the stage at the Hollywood Bowl to protest noise from a police helicopter.
Tilson Thomas served as 11th Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony from 1995 until his resignation after the 2019-20 season. His works as a composer included From the diary of Anne Franka UNICEF film that premiered in 1991 and is narrated by Audrey Hepburn.
Tilson Thomas was born in Los Angeles on December 21, 1944. His father, Theodor Tomaszewski, was a producer who worked at Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater Company and later on the Roy Rogers cowboy serials, and his mother, Roberta, was a researcher at Columbia Pictures. Grandparents Boris and Bessie Tomaszewski were founding members of the Yiddish Theater in America.
Tilson Thomas began playing piano at the age of three, and had a musical realization when he was 13 when he listened to Mahler – “I was very shocked to find that it described what my unresolved life was like,” he said. The Guardian In 2012 – at the age of nineteen he was appointed music director of the Young Musicians Foundation Orchestra in Los Angeles.
Later, he conducted the full LA Phil Youth Concerts and studied at the University of Southern California under Jascha Heifetz and Gregor Piatigorsky. He first met Bernstein in 1968, and the two began working together in New York.
In his mid-twenties, he became assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and created a sensation with his New York debut at Lincoln Center.
Tilson Thomas was guest conductor of the Los Angeles Phil Orchestra in the 1980s and principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra from 1988 to 1995, taking it on tour in Europe and the United States. In 1987, he co-founded the Miami-based New World Symphony to prepare young musicians around the world for careers in classical music.
In 2009, he created the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, made up of young players from 30 different countries, to perform a concert that can be viewed online.
Joshua Robison, his husband and manager, died in February at the age of 79.
“I think I’m somewhere between a director and an athletic trainer,” Tilson Thomas said. The Guardian. “You realize how talented the different musicians are and you try to imagine how they can get to the front of the performance. No good director, working with a particular cast, will try to force them to be something other than what they are. A good director doesn’t say to an actor: ‘Say the first three words quickly, and then the next two slowly,’ and so on throughout the play.”
“The point is that the actor has to play the role. It’s the same with music. You try to show musicians ways in which they can get the most out of the music and get the most out of each other.”
