For Michael Tilson Thomas, the grandeur of music answers a grim diagnosis
Nobody knows the now like Michael Tilson Thomas. The acclaimed conductor and composer, 12-time Grammy winner and Kennedy Center honoree, 77, also has an aptitude for the idiomatic. “Being a conductor,” he’s noted, “means you’re trying to get a lot of people to agree where ‘now’ is.”
As conductors go, MTT — as he’s commonly known — has an expanded sense of the now: as a conductor who has led orchestras around the globe and through storied posts in San Francisco, London and Miami; as a composer with a wide-ranging appetite for American musical traditions; as an advocate for new music and mentor to thousands of young orchestral players; and as an artist able to pair a panoramic understanding of music with a microscopic delight in the details.
Over the past year, Thomas’s close relationship with the now intensified even further. Last week, the conductor issued a statement providing additional details about his ongoing treatment for the “stealthy adversary” of glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive type of brain cancer.
In August, Thomas withdrew from a slate of scheduled performances, revealing in a statement that he’d undergone emergency surgery and chemotherapy treatment. In his most recent statement, Thomas noted that “recurrence is, unfortunately, the rule rather than the exception.” —Michael Andor Brodeur
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