Michael Tilson Thomas celebrates 80th birthday with a final bow in San Francisco
Michael Tilson Thomas has always known how to make an entrance — but on Saturday night at Davies Symphony Hall, his slow walk to the podium brought both roaring applause and visible emotion. At 80, the beloved conductor and composer was returning for one last performance with the San Francisco Symphony, the orchestra he led for 25 years and reshaped into a world-class institution.
This wasn’t just a concert. It was a farewell party, a love letter from a city and a symphony to the man affectionately known as MTT. With City Hall lit up in his favourite colour and a blue bandana draped on every seat, the event doubled as a celebration of his birthday and a poignant send-off following the recurrence of his brain cancer.
“Now is the time to wind down my public appearances,” Thomas had shared in February, noting the tumour had returned after three and a half years of treatment.
Yet even amid his health struggles, the conductor’s wit remained sharp. After surveying the crowd’s standing ovation, he asked for a drumroll before ascending the podium — unaided — to conduct the opening piece: Britten’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Henry Purcell.
It was a symbolic start. The piece gives solo moments to nearly every section of the orchestra — a musical conversation, it seemed, between Thomas and the players he’s inspired over a lifetime. Later in the program, as the brass thundered through Respighi’s Roman Festivals, Thomas resisted theatrical flourishes. He simply marked time, calm and steady, trusting the orchestra as always.
Thomas was joined onstage by conductors he mentored — Teddy Abrams and Edwin Outwater — as well as a quartet of solo singers, each offering tributes and personal stories. Jessica Vosk recalled losing a shoe mid-audition before Thomas cast her in West Side Story. Ben Jones, voice cracking, told the maestro, “You were one of the first people to make me feel like I might be able to do this.”
The program was filled with personal touches, from original songs by Thomas to favourites from his career, including Joseph Rumshinsky’s Overture from Khantshe in Amerike, which holds deep family significance: his grandmother, Bessie Thomashefsky, starred in the play’s 1911 premiere.
As he conducted, or occasionally half-conducted from his chair beside husband and event producer Joshua Robison, Thomas remained fully engaged. During Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms — a nod to his longtime mentor and friend — Thomas sang along softly, his hand tapping time.
The night concluded with “Some Other Time,” a wistful song by Bernstein, Comden and Green. As the orchestra played, Thomas added a quiet cymbal cue here, a downbeat there, before joining the vocalists in the final lines:
There’s so much more embracing
Still to be done
But time is racing
Oh well, we’ll catch up some other time.
Afterwards, in a rare public appearance at the post-concert reception, Thomas kept his remarks brief. “There’s wonderful history here, wonderful relationships,” he said, thanking the many colleagues, donors and friends who had gathered to honour him.
One of them, former symphony president John Goldman, summed up the feeling in the room: “You can’t think of the San Francisco Symphony without thinking of Michael Tilson Thomas. They are institutions joined together forever.”
And so, with blue balloons falling from the ceiling, and bandanas raised in tribute, MTT took his final bow — not just as a conductor, but as a mentor, innovator, and musical force whose legacy is now woven into the cultural fabric of San Francisco and far beyond.