@import url(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/css/topic/screen/200704/topic.css); Register Now Help Home Page ... Times Topics Search All NYTimes.com Monday, November 1, 2010 Times Topics U.S. N.Y. / Region ... T > Tilson Thomas, Michael E-MAIL Michael Tilson Thomas Jennifer Taylor for The New York Times Michael Tilson Thomas has been the music director of the San Francisco Symphony since 1995. Mr. Thomas was born in Hollywood in 1944. His paternal grandparents, Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, were superstars of the Yiddish theater in America at the end of the 19th century and well into the 20th; his parents, Theodor and Roberta Thomas, were also musically and theatrically inclined. Precociously musical, he started conducting ''by accident'' when he was 13, he told The Times in 2002, and he formed ensembles three or four years later. Put forward by his teacher Ingolf Dahl, he played piano and conducted in premieres of works by Dahl, Copland, Stravinsky, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and William Kraft, often with the composer present. He graduated from the University of Southern California in 1967 and won a conducting fellowship at the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts the next year. There he encountered Leonard Bernstein, who would loom over him like a shadow for two decades. Mr. Thomas began to seem the obvious heir to Bernstein's mantle as the American maestro. His gifts were similar: a prodigious natural musicality and a communicative gift as much verbal as musical. | |
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