Michael Tilson Thomas Is Prolifically Himself on Disc-OxBig News Network

The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas has always had a way with words, but one refrain of his is especially memorable.

“I have encouraged people to color outside the lines, for lack of a better analogy,” he told The New York Times in 2017, in announcing his departure from the San Francisco Symphony after a quarter century as its lauded music director. “We’re not trying to reproduce the notation here. We’re trying to get back to the inspiration that caused the notations to exist.”

Coloring outside the lines has been a way of life for Thomas, who, living with a terminal glioblastoma diagnosis from 2021, will turn 80 on Saturday. He has shown a certain freedom, a refusal to conform, a celebration of exuberance. Combined with a sprinkling of showmanship and a basic faith in the modern, these convictions have made Thomas, affectionately known as M.T.T., a crucial part of musical life for over five decades.

How has that philosophy fared on record? There’s an argument that to ask the question at all is to somewhat miss the point. If Thomas has been anything, he has been a live musician, a man of the theater whose mind has feasted on the parallels and juxtapositions that tend to be much more possible in the concert hall than in the studio. Joshua Kosman, a longtime critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, recently noted that “it’s the fleeting and protean quality of the event that corresponds, perhaps paradoxically, to M.T.T.’s deepest artistic commitments.” Records, for better and for worse, last forever.

Even so, Thomas has been a dedicated, prolific, important recording artist, as a pair of new box sets that collect much of his legacy confirm. From Sony, there comes an 80-disc compendium of recordings he made for the Columbia, Sony and RCA labels, chiefly as the music director or principal conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic (1971-79), the London Symphony (1988-95), and the San Francisco Symphony (1995-2020). If the Sony set is a monument to the breadth of his interests, a 14-disc Eloquence compilation of Deutsche Grammophon and Argo releases is more of a diamond cut in his honor, sparkling with the precocity of his whiz-kid years with the Boston Symphony, and shining with the inquisitive enthusiasm of the young players of the New World Symphony, which he founded in 1987.

Add his many recordings for the San Francisco Symphony’s own label and others, many of which remain widely available, as well as “Grace,” a four-disc tribute to his compositions that was recently released by Pentatone to benefit brain cancer research, and we now have as full a picture of Thomas preserved in sound as we are ever likely to have. And his traits emerge with striking fidelity.

Thomas’s discography is as notable for what it includes as for how well it is typically conducted. In “Viva Voce,” a 1994 book of conversations with the journalist Edward Seckerson, Thomas noted that record companies used to have certain requirements of conductors, namely that they would do the Beethoven, Brahms and Mahler symphonies, a bit of Wagner, maybe some French music. “There are, what, 70 or 90 pieces you’re expected to do,” he said.

Indeed, he has recorded many of those pieces, but he has succeeded remarkably well at shifting the focus elsewhere. There was a bold early Beethoven survey, mostly with the English Chamber Orchestra, which shows its age now that performance styles have evolved, and a celebrated Mahler cycle in San Francisco that probably never will. There is excellent Berlioz and ample, often unusual Tchaikovsky. Some composers appear in strange, if welcome guises, like Brahms, who is represented by his serenades rather than by his symphonies. Others are conspicuously quiet, like Haydn, Mozart, Bruckner and Sibelius.

Thomas’s achievement instead has been to fashion a repertoire for himself, one anchored much more firmly in the 20th century than the 19th or 18th, and far closer to home. Beethoven is still there, as are Mahler and Strauss, Debussy and Ravel. Stravinsky takes a starring role. But American music truly shines. Gershwin and Ives have been the twin poles of Thomas’s American Century, and around them have come Ruggles, Copland, Bernstein, Feldman, Adams and more. Few of these men can have hoped for more committed or more persuasive readings than Thomas has given them over the years.

GROWING UP in an intellectual Los Angeles household, and as an only child, Thomas had an astonishingly broad range of influences: his grandmother Bessie Thomashefsky, a founding light of American Yiddish theater; Jascha Heifetz and Gregor Piatigorsky, the superstars he accompanied at the University of Southern California; Stravinsky and Boulez, titans among the composers he performed as the pianist and conductor of the city’s Monday Evening Concerts; Ingolf Dahl, the teacher who taught him that enjoyment and analysis were one and the same.

By the time Thomas joined the Boston Symphony at 24, as its assistant conductor, he was saturated in music and full of ideas. “Let me say simply that right now he is one of the ablest and most interesting conductors in the profession,” the critic Michael Steinberg wrote after a 1969 debut in works by Haydn, Ives, Stravinsky and Debussy. “It was what I dreamed conducting would be like,” Thomas recalled. The hype burned nuclear, as this tyro with “more ideas about programming than an IBM systems man,” as one writer smirked, put Perotin, Stockhausen and Schumann on the same bill, then nearly caused a riot with Reich’s “Four Organs” at Carnegie Hall. “I don’t fling the word genius around lightly,” Bernstein, a friend, told The Times, “but I fling it at Michael.”

Opinions flowed torrentially from Thomas in those years, and some became abiding principles. From the start, he was determined to be an explorer and an advocate, in addition to being a performer — and a teacher, too. He talked so eagerly from the Symphony Hall stage in Boston that a trustee once yelled at him to shut up; he was more cogent by the time he made his series of “Keeping Score” documentaries in San Francisco.

He also believed that orchestras could and should be more than they had become. “All this talk about favorite performances is bad,” he said in 1971, decrying the impulse — reinforced by recordings — that originality in interpretation was suspect, that there was “only the permissible mean deviation between the Toscanini version and the Furtwängler.” He preferred the model of repertory theater. “There the most important thing is not how like the last time this performance was, but how different, and in what ways,” he added. He kept the comparison in mind throughout his career.

If Thomas’s first recordings offer a declaration of intent, they also bear out his reputation. Who else could have taped a thoroughly entertaining set of Gershwin’s Broadway overtures on the same day as parts of a Ruggles survey, as he did in Buffalo in 1976 — let alone do so with such an exact sense of style? Who else might have trusted enough in “The American Flag,” a forgotten Dvorak cantata, not only to unearth it, but also perform it so zealously? Who else could have dared make his first Beethoven album an exploration of late choral works? The Boston Symphony recordings are particularly special, renowned as classics for good reason: the bracing expressivity of his Ruggles “Sun-Treader,” the songful abandon of his Piston Second Symphony. Rarely has “The Rite of Spring” sounded so lyrical, so gleeful. God, how those musicians played for him.

IN AN ESSAY with the new Sony set, Thomas offers a guide to some of his prouder achievements on record, and his selections largely make sense. His complete set of Ives with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, offering the first recordings of the critical editions of the scores, remains an indispensable introduction to that composer; the restless quality of Thomas’s intelligence makes an ideal match for the contrasts and clashes of a great radical. It’s impossible not to fall for his Gershwin, whether the three accounts of the “Rhapsody in Blue,” including one with the composer’s own piano rolls, or the piano miniatures that Thomas plays himself. All of Thomas’s Stravinsky rewards hearing, especially a blistering San Francisco take on the “Rite.”

Throughout, there is little suggestion that Thomas is around only to follow a score, still less to impose himself on the notes rather than find the spirit between them. “I’m not going to stand on the podium and say, ‘I am the way, the truth and life,’” he explained in 1984. “There is no such person. And I have become accustomed to people either liking or disliking what I do. It’s never just a nice, perfunctory performance. That’s not what my work is about. It’s either revelation or desecration, depending on your point of view.”

If that is not especially apparent in many of Thomas’s studio efforts, it is truer of the live recordings he made in San Francisco, in which his constant search for meaning and his willingness to be emotionally frank can work both ways. Slow movements, for example, are frequently pushed to their breaking point: Sometimes they come off, as in the gut punch of a Mahler Sixth he set down just days after Sept. 11, and sometimes they do not, as in a turgid finale of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony. The highs are extraordinary, among them a crushing Mahler Ninth, stylish excerpts from Prokofiev “Romeo and Juliet,” and a rampant disc of Cowell, Harrison and Varèse. The lows, like a Schumann cycle, are a real slog.

Maybe it’s apt, given Thomas’s taste for upending expectations, that some of the most unusual of his recordings turn out to be among his most appealing. In the Eloquence set, there is a New World Symphony disc called “Tangazo,” a collection of Latin American music that is played with breathtaking rhythmic confidence and plenty of bite. The Sony box has an atmospheric disc of Villa-Lobos. A San Francisco box of jewels, “Masterpieces in Miniature,” is downright lovely, Delius and all.

“I never thought I would record Adam’s ‘Giselle,’” Thomas writes of that ballet score. I never thought I would love it so much.

It’s in recordings like these that you best hear one last characteristic of Thomas’s work. In an elegy for Bernstein, to whom he has so often been compared, he once wrote: “There was never any question of what he believed, what he championed. It was the joy of music. He lived it.”

You might say the same of Thomas, too.