Okay, maybe this won’t be a big deal to all that many people on this board or elsewhere… but I followed Thomas’s whole career because he was only four years older than me. I was like watching that kid in the class ahead of you make it big. And I always thought of him as a kid. So sue me.
I remember vividly when Thomas was a prodigy, a wunderkind. His mentor Leonard Bernstein said of him:
“I don’t fling the word genius around lightly, but I fling it around about Michael. He reminds me of me at that age, except that he knows more than I did,” conductor Leonard Bernstein told The New York Times Magazine for a 1971 profile.
Thomas’s career was launched in a way similar to Bernstein’s:
Tilson Thomas made his New York debut at Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall on Oct. 22, 1969, as a mid-concert replacement for an ailing William Steinberg.
He had a long and successful career and died of a glioblastoma brain tumor (like my late daughter-in-law).
It was a shock to me to see that someone I always followed and thought of as a kid had died as a Grand Old Man of the music world. I guess it’s like with me and my friends, “When did we get old?” This is the face I remember:
