Remembering the legacy of Michael Tilson Thomas

The Chicago Symphony’s concerts this weekend are dedicated to Michael Tilson Thomas, who died on April 22nd at his home in San Francisco. He was 81. Like so many others, I became unmoored by the news. Not because I knew him personally, but because so many of the concerts I remember most vividly from the last 30 years were his.

Friday’s reminder came by way of Karina Canellakis, who led the CSO through Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.5. The performance kept pulling me back to a night in Seattle in 2009, when MTT was conducting the San Francisco Symphony on a West Coast tour. That Tchaikovsky was something. Rope-a-dope with the audience’s emotions. Canellakis, to her credit, played the same game.

What made Tilson Thomas rare was how exuded curiosity and love for his craft. He never seemed to be going through the motions. Through his illness, he continued to make music. That commitment was visible long before his diagnosis. When he took the podium, you felt it was safe to surrender to the music. The ride would be worth it. It was through MTT that I fell in love with Ives, gained a much deeper appreciation for Mahler’s symphonies, and embraced Cowell, Ruggles, and Scelsi.

For 25 years, from 1995 to 2020, he served as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, lifting it to international standing. His relationship with the CSO was warm but never realized its full potential. There was speculation, some years back, that he might succeed Daniel Barenboim here. 

It never happened. Whether that was ever a possibility we will never know. But the idea of an American conductor of MTT’s pedigree, regularly conducting the CSO, is a tantalizing “what if.” If any American conductor could have won over Chicago it would have been him.

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The Chicago Symphony remembers Michael Tilson Thomas

“All night, one half-expected Tilson Thomas, among the most charismatic musical explainers since Bernstein, to address the audience, or somehow acknowledge the weight of this moment in ways only the torrents of applause dared to,” wrote Hannah Edgar in the Chicago Tribune. “But in the silence before the Brahms-Schoenberg, Tilson Thomas looked out over the orchestra for what felt like minutes, as though taking stock of each face. Later, lifting his baton for the third movement, he did something unusual: he spoke to the orchestra. ’Enjoy,’ he told them. ’Take it easy.’”

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Around Chicago:

Lawrence A. Johnson, Chicago Classical Review

“Canellakis took the lugubrious opening bars at a spacious tempo that immediately drew attention for the expressive concentration and the clarinets’ rich-voiced intoning of the symphony’s motto theme. Elsewhere the conductor leaned on fleet tempos in the modern manner yet consistently brought out the lyrical warmth of Tchaikovsky’s music. She built the drama and development of the opening movement surely, imbued with a nervy energy, to a thunderous climax.”