Michael Tilson Thomas and S.F. Symphony have been a partnership for the ages
Feb 6, 2024
By Joshua Kosman
San Francisco Chronicle
The San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas spent 50 years making music together, 25 of them with him as the orchestra’s music director. For those of us who lived through this era, it can sometimes feel too easy to take this fact for granted, as if it were simply the natural course of events.
But it wasn’t. It was a gift, and an extraordinarily rare one.
The number of partnerships between an American orchestra and a music director that have been so productive for so long is vanishingly small, to the point where it’s easy to list them off the top of your head: Serge Koussevitzky in Boston, Eugene Ormandy in Philadelphia, George Szell in Cleveland and Georg Solti in Chicago.
These are the pairings for which the identity of conductor and orchestra merged so thoroughly that speaking of one meant speaking of the other. In each case, their artistic personalities were a single joint creation, designed and crafted by the conductor, and forged out of the raw materials that the musicians contributed.
That’s the honor roll in which Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony — uniquely over the last half century — can claim a place.
Today was not the day I had ever hoped to make these observations. Thomas made his San Francisco debut in 1974, and although five decades of performances have given local audiences a musical bounty almost beyond imagining, it hasn’t been enough. We should have had more.
The three concerts on Jan 25-27 devoted to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, though, were designated as the last subscription program with Thomas on the podium. Since his diagnosis in 2021 with brain cancer, he has returned to Davies Symphony Hall again and again, defying expectations with stirring performances of Mahler’s Sixth and Beethoven’s Ninth symphonies.
If we’re very fortunate, we may yet have another opportunity to hear these musicians working together on an ad hoc basis. For now, though, this partnership — arguably the most consequential in the orchestra’s 113-year history — has officially come to an end. So it’s a good time to outline and celebrate the scope of Thomas’ achievements.
