San Francisco Symphony

Michael Tilson Thomas conducts the SF Symphony and special guests, 2019 Opening Night Gala concert

2019–20

BAY AREA BEACON

Michael Tilson Thomas is a musician, a term that implies far more than the practice of music alone. To be a musician is to embrace the whole, to practice the art at the highest level at all times and in all roles. But there’s an even more descriptive word: visionary, defined as “one having unusual foresight and imagination.” Michael Tilson Thomas’ quarter century at the San Francisco Symphony has brought the illimitable value of a music directorship into sharp focus. He’s shown us how it can be done. And now the leadership passes to a new director and a new era at a great orchestra that MTT’s extraordinary leadership has equipped to carry the art forward in style, grace, and vigor.

TODAY’S PICK

Sasha Cooke sings “Immer wieder” from MTT’s Meditations on Rilke, an SFS Media release from 2020

MTT25

It’s Michael Tilson Thomas’ 25th and final season as San Francisco Symphony Music Director—and his 75th birthday—and his “continued youthful vitality” (to quote John Adams) shows no sign of slowing down. MTT is everywhere in this historic season: Opening San Francisco’s glittering Chase Center arena in a two-night stand with the Symphony and Metallica; receiving a Kennedy Center Honor and being named an Officer in the French Order of Arts and Letters; premiering works by John Adams and Julia Wolfe; conducting recordings of American music on SFS Media; unveiling his own new compositions; and leading Mahler’s Sixth Symphony in his final live performances as Music Director. It’s a time of celebration tinged with sadness in a season shortened by a global pandemic. But if watching MTT for 25 years has taught us anything, it’s that there are many more adventures still to come.

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The essential thing for me has always been, ‘What happens when the performance is over? What transformation has occurred in the listener? What are they led to knowing?’ ”

— Michael Tilson Thomas in the San Francisco Chronicle, June 10, 2020

MTT and Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich

MTT with Metallica and the SF Symphony at the Chase Center

MTT being named an Officer in the French Order of Arts and Letters

2019 Kennedy Center Honorees

What has struck me most about Michael over these three years is his ceaseless curiosity. Whether we’re talking about a new musical work or a beloved masterpiece, he is constantly pushing himself—and by extension our organization—to approach it as if for the first time. His lasting legacy is the fact that he’s developed a couple generations of audience members who approach music of all kinds with open minds, opens ears and open hearts. What an incredible legacy that is to pass on to one’s successor. ”

— San Francisco Symphony CEO Mark C. Hanson in the San Francisco Chronicle, June 10, 2020

Ryan McKinny, MTT, Sasha Cooke, and the SF Symphony

Meditations on Rilke

The San Francisco Symphony’s world premiere of Meditations on Rilke in January 2020 reveals yet another side of Michael Tilson Thomas’s compositional voice. In setting texts by one of his favorite poets, Rainer Maria Rilke, MTT inhabits an “approach to music as a kind of lifelong journal or confessional companion.” Mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke and bass-baritone Ryan McKinny debut these songs in memorable performances captured by SFS Media. (The resulting recording, released June 26, 2020, also features MTT’s From the Diary of Anne Frank.)

MTT and special guests, 2019 Opening Night Gala concert

MTT and Joshua Robison

After 25 years, Mr. Thomas’s mark on this ensemble is unmistakable. He has hired 50 of its 108 players, and he has demonstrably honed the orchestra’s technical precision. But his most lasting imprint may extend beyond the doors of Davies Symphony Hall. . . . For this conductor has made classical concertgoing a defining aspect of life in San Francisco—something plainly evident at the September gala that marked the opening of his final season, when luminaries from across the city, including the mayor, the police chief and senior executives from all four of the area’s major-league sports franchises, paid onstage homage to Mr. Thomas. (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and California Gov. Gavin Newsom also participated in the festivities.) ”

— David Mermelstein, Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2020

Sakurako Fisher and MTT

The [performances] that have lodged in my memory with the most tenacious glow are the performances of music I thought I knew well, in which some new level of understanding or emotional connection suddenly materialized. . . . What [they all] had in common was the sense that the artistic experience was being whipped up in that moment, just for me and my fellow listeners, like some kind of artisanal table-side meal preparation. It’s something that requires not only technical prowess on everyone’s part but also a shared commitment and openness to surprise, which in the end is the most important aspect of Thomas’ artistic legacy in San Francisco. ”

— Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle, June 10, 2020

SF Symphony brass salute MTT, 2019 Opening Night Gala concert

From the beginning, it has been a remarkable musical marriage. Mr. Thomas presented an American work in each subscription program he led that first season, a bold statement. But he simply saw the role of an American orchestra as championing American music. If that idea now seems standard, it’s in part because of him. He embraced composers a bit outside the mainstream, like Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Morton Feldman, John Cage and Henry Brant, inaugurating an American Mavericks series that drew in eager audiences. He fostered relationships with living composers; brought the orchestra to new heights of technical vitality; and turned it into one of the world’s most respected Mahler ensembles, performing and recording the composer’s complete symphonies and song cycles on a series of albums—released on the orchestra’s SFS Media label, another Thomas initiative—that garnered multiple Grammy Awards. It was also no small thing that he was an openly gay music director when that was, as it still is, a rarity. ”

— Anthony Tommasini, New York Times, June 5, 2020

MTT and Oliver Herbert

MTT leads Mahler’s Sixth Symphony

There’s so much luck involved in this career. You can’t know where you’re going to wind up, or in what size type your name will appear. But if you can know that you’re making wonderful music, and if you can keep the wonder of it present, as my father would say, then you’re a big winner. Whoever becomes a musician and has a 40- or 50-year career, and at the end of it find your soul is in a more nurtured and enlightened place than it was when you started—well, that’s what I call a successful life. ”

— Michael Tilson Thomas in the San Francisco Chronicle, June 10, 2020

MUSICIAN APPOINTMENTS
Jessie Fellows
(Assistant Principal Second Violin)

CONDUCTING STAFF
Daniel Stewart (Wattis Foundation Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra)

PREMIERES
Julia Wolfe: Fountain of Youth
(West Coast premiere, San Francisco Symphony co-commission)

Michael Tilson Thomas: Meditations on Rilke
(World premiere)

John Adams: I Still Dance
(World premiere, San Francisco Symphony co-commission)

Gordon Getty: Shenaandoah
(World premiere)

2019–20

TODAY’S PICK

MTT25

Meditations on Rilke

Recordings

Tune in to KDFC at 3pm daily for “MTT Time”—special concert broadcasts from each year of MTT’s historic tenure, featuring commentary from MTT himself.