By David Allen
The New York Times
As Thomas turns 80, new collections of his recordings reveal the legacy of a maestro who has exuberantly refused to conform to expectations.
The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas has always had a way with words, but one refrain of his is especially memorable.
“I have encouraged people to color outside the lines, for lack of a better analogy,” he told The New York Times in 2017, in announcing his departure from the San Francisco Symphony after a quarter century as its lauded music director. “We’re not trying to reproduce the notation here. We’re trying to get back to the inspiration that caused the notations to exist.”
Coloring outside the lines has been a way of life for Thomas, who, living with a terminal glioblastoma diagnosis from 2021, will turn 80 on Saturday. He has shown a certain freedom, a refusal to conform, a celebration of exuberance. Combined with a sprinkling of showmanship and a basic faith in the modern, these convictions have made Thomas, affectionately known as M.T.T., a crucial part of musical life for over five decades.
How has that philosophy fared on record? There’s an argument that to ask the question at all is to somewhat miss the point. If Thomas has been anything, he has been a live musician, a man of the theater whose mind has feasted on the parallels and juxtapositions that tend to be much more possible in the concert hall than in the studio. Joshua Kosman, a longtime critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, recently noted that “it’s the fleeting and protean quality of the event that corresponds, perhaps paradoxically, to M.T.T.’s deepest artistic commitments.” Records, for better and for worse, last forever.
Even so, Thomas has been a dedicated, prolific, important recording artist, as a pair of new box sets that collect much of his legacy confirm.