Michael Tilson Thomas’s composing legacy celebrated

Michael Tilson Thomas is best known as a conductor, although throughout his career he’s also had a big impact as an educator, pianist and as the co-founder and director of the New World Symphony, America’s Orchestral Academy. But in his 80th year, record label Pentatone is turning the spotlight on his work as a composer, with a new four-disc set showcasing his music titled Grace: The Music of Michael Tilson Thomas.

Tilson Thomas has been a composer since childhood, but it was only in the late 1980s that his music came to public attention. In 1990, his first large-scale work for orchestra, From the Diary of Anne Frank, put him on the map, and over the years he continued to compose, with his most recent work including Meditations on Rilke, from 2019. Grace features 18 works, including premiere recordings and remastered archival works.

Performers include sopranos Renée Fleming and Measha Brueggergosman-Lee, baritone Thomas Hampson, and Tilson Thomas conducting the San Francisco Symphony, where he was music director from 1995-2020 and is now conductor laureate. In an essay commissioned for the booklet, writer Larry Rothe says: ‘If you know his music, you will know something about Michael Tilson Thomas, because it embodies his own balance of gravitas and whimsy.’

All proceeds from the set, which is out this October, will be donated to brain cancer research at the University of California, San Francisco Brain Tumor Center. In 2021, Tilson Thomas shared publicly his diagnosis with glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive form of brain cancer.