The American conductor, composer and pianist Michael Tilson Thomas (b. 1944) celebrated his 80th birthday in December of 2024, and his record companies have marked it with much fanfare. Earlier in the year Eloquence produced a set of CDs made early on for Deutsche Grammophon with the Boston Symphony (still some of the conductor’s best work), plus Argo recordings featuring the professional training orchestra he set up in Miami, the New World Symphony. During this century, MTT’s performances were released on the San Francisco Symphony’s SFS Media label: he was music director there from 1995 until 2020.

Michael Tilson Thomas. Photo © Kristen Loken

In between, MTT recorded for Sony and RCA with several orchestras with which he was associated including the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, and most of all the London Symphony Orchestra. His very wide and at times unusual repertoire is well and truly covered in this 80-CD collection. He made highly regarded discs of the complete Mahler symphonies in San Francisco, but the precursors of those performances may be found here with the...