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LONDON (October 2, 2024) — Gramophone has named conductor Michael Tilson Thomas winner of its prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award.
Gramophone Editor Martin Cullingford said, “His legacy lies not just in a remarkable recording catalogue, but in the fact that there are works of music cherished by so many largely thanks to his advocacy, and that there are audience members who might never have been drawn to classical music in the first place were it not for his belief that everyone has the potential to be so.”
Winner of 12 Grammy Awards, Michael Tilson Thomas has conducted more than 120 recordings, spanning repertoire from Bach and Beethoven to Debussy and Stravinsky, and including collaborations with artists ranging from Sarah Vaughan to Metallica. In 1991, UNICEF commissioned Michael Tilson Thomas to compose a work featuring Audrey Hepburn as the narrator. The commission, From the Diary of Anne Frank, was performed by Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony (which he co-founded in 1987) in a series of benefit concerts for UNICEF. The work was later recorded by SFS Media and went on to win the 2021 Grammy Award for Best Classical Compendium. The following September, Avie Records released an album of solo piano works performed by John Wilson including the world première recording of Michael Tilson Thomas’s Upon Further Reflection, and in 2023, You Come Here Often? recorded by Yuja Wang and Teddy Abrams for DG won the Grammy Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo.
On October 4, in celebration of Michael Tilson Thomas’s 80th birthday on December 21, PENTATONE will honour his lifetime of contributions as a composer by releasing a deluxe collection of CDs and digital recordings of his compositions. The four-disc set ‘GRACE’ spans more than five decades of his compositional career and features 18 works, from première recordings to remastered archival recordings available for the first time. The deluxe collection also includes an extensive booklet containing composer’s notes, original essays, and a timeline of archival photos chronicling Michael Tilson Thomas’s life as a pianist, conductor, composer, recording artist, and teacher. All proceeds from GRACE: The Music of Michael Tilson Thomas will be donated to brain cancer research at the UCSF Brain Tumor Center. Two additional box sets of Michael Tilson Thomas’s recordings for Deutsche Grammophon and Sony will be released later this year.
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