It’s been nearly 10 years since Michael Tilson Thomas announced that he would step down as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, six years since he officially ended his tenure in the middle of the COVID-19 shutdown, four years since his cancer diagnosis became public, two years since his final subscription program with the orchestra and six months since his death.
Sometimes it feels as if we’ve spent the past decade saying goodbye to him.
Yet MTT’s spirit is still here among us, vividly filling the city with his inimitable showbiz charisma, urging us to listen, reminding us that music really can save the world.
That was the takeaway from the moving celebratory event that the Symphony offered in Davies Symphony Hall on Friday, Oct. 2. Part concert and part Jewish wake, the three-hour enterprise featured plenty of music, naturally, as well as adulatory speeches, funny stories and reminiscences. There were photos and videos of Thomas and his life partner, Joshua Robison, who died just two months before he did.
It all served as yet another reminder of what an outsize cultural presence Thomas was, both locally and around the world, and how lasting his influence promises to be.
San Francisco Symphony piccolo player Cathy Payne, left, and conductor Edwin Outwater during A Concert for MTT at Davies Symphony Hall on Friday, Oct. 2, 2026. (Kristen Loken/San Francisco Symphony)
He filled our lives with music, in the form of countless exciting, unpredictable performances, both live and recorded. As Symphony CEO Matthew Spivey put it, Thomas’ credo was that “a concert should be an adventure.”
But beyond that, Thomas also trained generation after generation of younger musicians to pursue the artistic goals that he himself always favored: surprise, experimentation and expressivity that could border on sentimentality.
Those students and protégés filled the stage on Friday to offer their own musical tributes. Teddy Abrams and Edwin Outwater shared the conducting duties, and spoke with feeling about their memories of Thomas.
“When I was growing up listening to the San Francisco Symphony, I took a lot of things for granted,” Abrams told the crowd. “I thought a project like ‘American Mavericks’ was something that every orchestra did.
“It wasn’t until later that I discovered that was not true at all.”
Jazz guitarist Bruce Forman, left, and singer Audra McDonald at A Concert for MTT at Davies Symphony Hall on Friday, Oct. 2, 2026. (Kristen Loken/San Francisco Symphony)
Outwater recalled that his first week as the Symphony’s associate conductor had coincided with the attacks of September 11, and the way Thomas had rallied the orchestra to go ahead with that week’s planned performances of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony.
“He spoke to us for a long time about the importance of music in situations like that,” Outwater said. “I’d always figured that music couldn’t, you know, stop wars or change the world. But Michael believed that it absolutely could.”
Then he led the orchestra in the luminous slow movement of the Sixth.
Pianists Yuja Wang, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Jeremy Denk and John Wilson contributed musical interludes both expansive and modest. So did the singers Audra McDonald, Sasha Cooke and – in an unbilled surprise appearance – Renée Fleming, the soloist for this week’s all-Strauss program.
The memoirist Jamie Bernstein, daughter of the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, reminisced about the time a young MTT first showed up at their home to study with her father. She recalled how he immediately proved he could go toe-to-toe with the great man on everything from arcane corners of the musical literature to wordplay and Yiddish jokes.
Jamie Bernstein, author, filmmaker and Leonard Bernstein’s daughter, speaks at A Concert for MTT at Davies Symphony Hall on Friday, Oct. 2, 2026. (Kristen Loken/San Francisco Symphony)
There were also reminiscences from those who had worked with him, including Chung-Wai Soong of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus and the orchestra’s piccoloist Cathy Payne.
But the music, of course,was primary. What was striking about the evening’s program was how perfectly it reflected Thomas’ own priorities. In addition to the Mahler, Abrams led two excerpts from the “New England Holidays” Symphony of Charles Ives – two of the composers Thomas has long been associated with.
Music by Berkeley composer John Adams and the “Dean of American Music,” Aaron Copland, framed the program, with the big opening movement from Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms” standing at the halfway point like a tentpole. There were selections from the so-called “American Mavericks,” including Meredith Monk, John Cage and Lou Harrison.
The program, in other words, consisted of “stuff Michael liked.” At times it seemed as though, if you somehow hadn’t known who the evening’s dedicatee was, you could have inferred it from the musical lineup alone.
A Concert for MTT at Davies Symphony Hall on Friday, Oct. 2, 2026. (Kristen Loken/San Francisco Symphony)
Thomas’ own music was represented not only by a song from his “Meditations on Rilke,” sung by Cooke with deep-toned intensity, but by a short, lovely piano solo, “Constancy,” that was composed in 2020 but given its world premiere on this occasion. In Wilson’s exemplary performance, you could hear the music open out from a starkly quizzical beginning – a pair of notes, another one slightly further apart – until those elements became a richly detailed dialogue.
Equally stirring was the premiere of a song by Bay Area composer Mason Bates, yet another MTT protégé, commissioned for the occasion. The text was from a postcard that Thomas’ father, Ted, had sent him – a terse, evocative poem about the beautiful silence of the predawn city that ends “Love, Dad.”
Bates sets that last bit to music as well, and before singing, Cooke talked briefly about how much the song’s closing meant to her.
“For me, and so many other musicians who worked with Michael, he really was like a father figure,” she said. “So when I sing that last line, we all really feel it.”
Cooke might have added that this was true for his audiences as well. MTT left us all a legacy that promises to enrich our lives forever.
Joshua Kosman is the Chronicle’s classical music critic emeritus.
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This article originally published at ‘A concert should be an adventure’: How Michael Tilson Thomas’ legacy lives on in S.F..