Michael Tilson Thomas, the conductor, pianist and composer who led the San Francisco Symphony for 25 years, died Wednesday at his San Francisco home at 81. He had lived publicly with glioblastoma, a brain cancer, since 2021.
His death ends a career that shaped American orchestral life for decades and reached well beyond the concert hall. In February 2025, he said his tumor had returned, and in April he led what became his final performance with the San Francisco Symphony, a belated 80th birthday concert.
Tilson Thomas was born into American theater history as the grandson of Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, the reigning stars of New York’s Yiddish theater in the early 20th century. He later turned that family legacy into The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater, which he premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2005 and later toured with major orchestras; the project grew into the Thomashefsky Project, dedicated to preserving Yiddish theater records and performance materials.
He also helped redefine what a major orchestra could present onstage. During his San Francisco tenure, he mounted semi-staged, video-enhanced productions of Britten’s Peter Grimes and Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, a range that reflected his appetite for mixing tradition with theatrical invention.
His connection to Bernstein went back to 1968, when he met him as a young fellow at Tanglewood. Bernstein remained a lifelong mentor, and Tilson Thomas carried that influence into a career that won him 12 Grammy Awards and produced an extensive recording legacy. He founded the New World Symphony in Miami Beach in 1987, and the training academy remains part of his professional footprint. His husband, Joshua Robison, died earlier in 2025. What remains now is the body of work: the recordings, the institution he built, and the orchestra he led for a quarter century.
