Michael Tilson Thomas, award-winning conductor and composer, dies aged 81

Michael Tilson Thomas, a leading American conductor for a half-century who headed orchestras in Buffalo, Miami, London and San Francisco while also composing, died on Wednesday. He was 81.

Tilson Thomas had surgery for a brain tumor in 2021 and resumed his career, then said in February 2025 that the tumor had returned. He conducted his final concert with the San Francisco Symphony in April 2025 and died at his home in San Francisco, spokesperson Connie Shuman said.

Tilson Thomas received 39 Grammy award nominations, winning 12, and was among the Kennedy Center Honors recipients in 2019.

“It’s meant to have various intriguing and alluring, questioning things that you hear on first hearing,” he said of classical music during a 2004 interview with the Associated Press. “But by its very nature it’s holding a lot of other secrets or a lot of other perspectives much closer to its chest, which only with repeated hearing you start realizing are there.”

Tilson Thomas was born in Los Angeles on 21 December 1944, to a family steeped in the arts. His father, Ted, was a producer at New York’s Mercury Theater Company, then worked in Los Angeles in the movie and television industry. His mother, Roberta, headed research for Columbia Pictures. His grandparents, Bessie and Boris Thomashefsky, were pioneers in American Yiddish theater.

He played piano at a young age and attended the University of Southern California. By the time he received a degree in 1967, he had worked with Pierre Boulez, Aaron Copland, Igor Stravinsky and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

“I don’t fling the word genius around lightly, but I fling it around about Michael. He reminds me of me at that age, except that he knows more than I did,” conductor Leonard Bernstein told the New York Times Magazine for a 1971 profile. “Not only music, but things like the functions of the brain, cerebrology, physics, biochemistry.”

Tilson Thomas was the co-music director and then music director of California’s Ojai festival in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was an assistant at Germany’s Bayreuth festival in 1966, won the Koussevitzky prize at the Tanglewood Music Center in 1968 and became a Boston Symphony Orchestra assistant conductor in 1969.

Tilson Thomas made his New York debut at Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall on 22 October 1969, as a mid-concert replacement for an ailing William Steinberg. Tilson Thomas led Robert Starer’s Concerto for Violin, Cello and Orchestra, and Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel.