Michael Tilson Thomas
Michael Tilson Thomas became the San Francisco Symphony’s Music Director in September 1995. A Los Angeles native, he studied piano with John Crown and composition and conducting with Ingolf Dahl at the University of Southern California. At age 19, he became music director of the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra, and worked with Stravinsky, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Copland on premieres of their compositions at the famed Monday Evening Concerts. He was pianist and conductor for master classes given by Piatigorsky and Heifetz and, as a student of Friedelind Wagner, an assistant conductor at Bayreuth. In 1969, at age 24, Mr. Tilson Thomas won the Koussevitzky Prize and was appointed assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Ten days later, he came to international recognition, replacing music director William Steinberg in mid-concert at Lincoln Center. He went on to become the BSO’s associate conductor, then principal guest conductor; in addition, he has served as chief conductor and director of the Ojai Festival, music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, and a principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He has toured the world with the London Symphony Orchestra, of which he became principal conductor in 1988 and now serves as Principal Guest Conductor. Until 2000, he was co-artistic director of the Pacific Music Festival, and he continues as Artistic Director of the New World Symphony, which he founded in 1987. His compositions include From the Diary of Anne Frank, Shówa/Shoáh, Poems of Emily Dickinson, Urban Legend, Island Music, and Notturno.
Mr. Tilson Thomas’s recordings have won numerous awards, including Grammy Awards for SFS recordings of Mahler’s symphonies Nos. 3, 6, 7, and 8. In 2004, he and the SFS launched Keeping Score on PBS. Mr. Tilson Thomas’s honors include Columbia University’s Ditson Award for services to American music, the American Music Center’s Letter of Distinction, and the President’s Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. He is a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres of France, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was named one of America’s Best Leaders by US News & World Report, and was recently awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Obama.
San Francisco Symphony
The San Francisco Symphony gave its first concerts in 1911, and has grown in acclaim under a succession of music directors: Henry Hadley, Alfred Hertz, Basil Cameron, Issay Dobrowen, Pierre Monteux, Enrique Jordá, Josef Krips, Seiji Ozawa, Edo de Waart, Herbert Blomstedt, and, since 1995, Michael Tilson Thomas. The SFS has won such recording awards as France’s Grand Prix du Disque and Britain’s Gramophone Award, and the Mahler cycle inaugurated in 2001 on the SFS’s own label has been honored with numerous Grammy Awards, including those for Best Classical Album (Mahler’s Third, Seventh, and Eighth symphonies), Best Choral Performance and Best Engineered Classical Album (Mahler’s Eighth Symphony), and Best Orchestral Performance (Mahler’s Sixth and Seventh symphonies). A series of earlier recordings by Mr. Tilson Thomas and the orchestra for RCA Red Seal also won praise, and their collection of Stravinsky ballets for RCA (Le Sacre du printemps, The Firebird, and Perséphone) received three Grammys. Some of the most important conductors of the past and recent years have been guests on the SFS podium, among them Bruno Walter, Leopold Stokowski, Leonard Bernstein, and Sir Georg Solti, and among the composers who have led the orchestra are Stravinsky, Ravel, Copland, and John Adams. The SFS Youth Orchestra, founded in 1980, has become known around the world, as has the SFS Chorus, heard on recordings and on the soundtracks of such films as Amadeus and Godfather III. Adventures in Music, the longest running education program among US orchestras, brings music to children in grades one through five in San Francisco’s public schools. SFS radio broadcasts, the first in the nation to feature symphonic music when they began in 1926, today carry the orchestra’s concerts across the country. In a multimedia program designed to make classical music accessible to all, the SFS has launched the second season of Keeping Score on PBS, DVD, keepingscore.org, and radio (The MTT Files). San Francisco Symphony recordings are available at sfsymphony.org/store.
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