Michael Tilson Thomas, former musical director of the San Francisco Symphony, defied odds by continuing to conduct after his 2020 retirement and a 2021 brain cancer diagnosis. Despite the challenges posed by COVID and treatment, he performed in various locations, won a Grammy, and was honored with a street named after him. His performance of Mahler's Fifth Symphony demonstrated both his skill and resilience, revealing the emotional depth of the Adagietto, sustaining an ethereal quality that left the audience in awe, while also highlighting an uncharacteristic struggle in earlier movements.
Even after he retired as the San Francisco Symphony's musical director for more than 25 years in 2020 and announced he had an aggressive form of brain cancer in 2021, Michael Tilson Thomas kept on trucking.
Though COVID and cancer treatment kinked his perpetually smooth musical strut, he still conducted in spots like Houston and his hometown Los Angeles, won a Grammy for his transcendent 2019 composition Meditations on Rilke.
Yet the first two movements of the Mahler were uncharacteristically unmoored... Miraculously, MTT snapped things together during the time-stopping third-movement Adagietto...
It was light years beyond what we in the audience had any right to expect; only the triumph of his technique is allowing me to voice any criticism at all.
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