GRAMOPHONE: Michael Tilson Thomas – A Personal Tribute

Like many avid record collectors my first awareness of Michael Tilson Thomas were the Deutsche Grammophon recordings which arrived in the wake of his appointment as assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the age of just 24. As recipient of the Koussevitsky Prize in 1969 it was almost a foregone conclusion. The word ‘auspicious’ didn’t even begin to cover it. One of those DG discs – a sensational pairing of Ives, Ruggles, and Piston (start as you mean to go on) – was tantamount to a personal manifesto: a commitment to American music that would stretch across his career and peak during his later years in San Francisco. The other DG disc was a luminous performance of Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony ‘Winter Daydreams’, rarely performed at the time and an interesting (even bold) choice for one so young. But it spoke of his family’s Russian roots and opened up a shared passion with myself for Tchaikovsky’s music. A subsequent recording (for Sony) of the Third Suite (again a…