American Mavericks

MTT

 Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) celebrates his 17th season as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony during the Orchestra’s 2011-12 Centennial Season.  He and the Orchestra have been praised by critics for innovative programming and for bringing the works of American composers to the fore, and have brought new audiences into Davies Symphony Hall. 

In his inaugural season as Music Director in 1995, Tilson Thomas included an American work on nearly every one of his San Francisco Symphony programs, and ended the season with An American Festival, a groundbreaking two-week celebration of American music.  In 2000, Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony presented a landmark 12-concert American Mavericks Festival, a celebration of America’s maverick musical heritage of the 20th century.

Michael Tilson Thomas’s recordings with the San Francisco Symphony have won numerous international awards, including 11 Grammys.  For the Orchestra’s own SFS Media label, MTT and the SFS have recently finished a Mahler recording project to great acclaim.  The most recent SFS Media label release features two rarely heard works, Copland’s Organ Symphony with Paul Jacobs and Ives’ A Concord Symphony, arranged by Henry Brant.

Committed to reaching new audiences and increasing access to orchestral music, MTT and the SFS created the acclaimed national Keeping Score PBS television series and multimedia project, unprecedented among American orchestras.  Keeping Score is anchored by eight composer documentaries and eight live concert films featuring music by Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Copland, Ives, Berlioz, Shostakovich, and Mahler.

Also noted for his work as a composer, MTT has given world premieres of many of his works with the San Francisco Symphony.   In 1999, MTT conducted the SFS in the first orchestral version of Three Songs to Poems by Walt Whitman, and in 2001, Renée Fleming and the SFS premiered his song cycle Poems of Emily Dickinson.  In 2002, Tilson Thomas led the SFS in the world premiere of his contrabassoon concerto Urban Legend, with SFS contrabassoonist Steven Braunstein as soloist.  In 2005, MTT and the SFS performed Tilson Thomas’s Island Music, dedicated to the memory of Lou Harrison.  His composition Shówa/Shoáh was written in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. 

Noted for his commitment to music education, Tilson Thomas regularly leads the Orchestra in education concerts, which the San Francisco Symphony has been providing for its community since 1919.  He led the television broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic’s famed Young People’s Concerts from 1971 to 1977.  He is founder and artistic director of America’s Orchestral Academy, the New World Symphony in Miami, and has led both YouTube Symphony Orchestra programs in Carnegie Hall and in Sydney Australia.

Tilson Thomas’s many honors include the National Medal of Arts, the highest award given to artists by the U.S. government, presented by President Barack Obama in February 2010.

More complete biographical information about Michael Tilson Thomas can be found here as part of his San Francisco Symphony online press kit.

(September 2011)