Michael Tilson Thomas

The life and career of the hailed Hollywood movie star and underappreciated genius inventor, Hedy Lamarr.

Open details →

Explore the art of music recording with a behind-the-scenes look at the birth of brand new sounds. Featuring more than 160 original interviews with some of the most celebrated recording artists of all time, Soundbreaking explores the nexus of cutting-edge technology and human artistry that has created the soundtrack of our lives.

Open details →

The LSO’s Principal Guest Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas celebrated his 70th birthday in 2015 with a concert focusing on British and Russian music, but with a nod to his native USA. He’s joined by the sensational young Chinese pianist Yuja Wang in Gershwin’s popular Concerto. Michael Tilson Thomas gave the US premiere of Colin Matthews’ Hidden Variables, an LSO commission during Matthews’ time as an Associate Composer with the LSO.

Open details →

Michael Tilson Thomas explores the lives of his grandparents, Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, through a musical performance that features five performers and the New World Symphony orchestra.

Open details →

Examining Mahler's creative flowering, from the 1890's to his untimely death at the age of 51, in 1911, including Symphonies 5 through 10, the Rückert songs and the "Song of the Earth". The episode also charts Mahler's mercurial career as a conductor, from the Vienna Opera (some called it the most prestigious music job in the world) to Carnegie Hall in New York, as well as his tempestuous relationship with his wife Alma. At Mahler's simple grave in Vienna's Grinzing cemetery, MTT explains why Mahler has so profoundly affected his own life.

Open details →

Focusing on Mahler's birth, conflicted childhood and early influences in the backwoods of Bohemia, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, through his student days in Vienna and early song-writing to his emerging triumph as a conductor in concert halls all over Europe. The premiere of his own First Symphony in Budapest in 1888 shocked the contemporary audience, but this ground-breaking work, Tilson Thomas explains, contains many of the seeds of everything else that Mahler composed.

Open details →

Mahler's Symphony No.1 by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra including selected movements of the fifth, seventh and ninth symphonies and the complete Songs of a Wayfarer with baritone Thomas Hampson.

Open details →

MasterClass is a documentary television series airing on HBO. Each half-hour episode documents the experience of a small group of young artists working with a famous mentor. The series premiered on HBO on April 18, 2010 with opera star Plácido Domingo working with three aspiring young singers. The students in the program are chosen from participants in the Miami-based organization, YoungArts, a program of the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, which supports emerging artists. The series is produced and directed by Karen Goodman and Kirk Simon of the Simon & Goodman Picture Company. The Executive Producer is Lin Arison. In July 2011 the series was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Nonfiction, Reality or Reality-Competition Program in 2011.

Open details →

Shostakovich may have secreted a subversive cipher beneath the surface of his life-saving Symphony No. 5. This is all the more shocking since another bad review from Stalin’s totalitarian forces could have meant a sentence to the Gulag or worse.... When he penned this fifth symphony, the composer was literally writing for his life. The risk was so high that Shostakovich slept on the stairs outside his apartment so the secret police would not wake his family when they came from him, as he was sure they would. This Keeping Score episode, investigates the arresting symphony that would either redeem Shostakovich or doom him. Did he dare hide a kernel of musical criticism in what appears to be a paean to the Motherland? Join Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony as they explore the hidden language of this masterwork. Episode includes full-length concert performance of Dimitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 in D minor by the San Francisco Symphony.

Open details →

In 1827, Berlioz saw Harriet Smithson for the first time, playing Ophelia in a production of Hamlet. Hopelessly smitten, he turned his entire life upside down to meet her. Frantic months turned into years when he suddenly heard rumors about Harriet and another man. Believing himself cured, he wrote a ‘fantastic’ symphony complete with a special theme, the idée fixe, to represent his former obsession.

Open details →

Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony rehearse and perform Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

Open details →

Savage and primitive, hypnotic and hell-bent, Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring turned Paris into the scene of one of the most astounding opening nights in history. In this episode of Keeping Score, the clutching tendrils of the music pull us back through France and Russia to the wild abandon of pagan times.

Open details →

Support for the arts in America may be dwindling, but talent in our high schools isn't. Every year a group of the country's most gifted 17-year-old performing and visual artists - singled out among thousands of their peers - share a week of dreams as they learn from mentors like Mikhail Baryshnikov, Vanessa Williams, Jacques d'Amboise, Michael Tilson Thomas... and from each other. For seven transformative days, the passionate young artists revel in the support, encouragement and attention they have earned.

Open details →

Beethoven spent three years composing the Eroica, an intimate journal of his emotional crises and his dramatic emergence as an original master. Michael Tilson Thomas and the musicians of the San Francisco Symphony help you make sense of this voyage into life as it really is.

Open details →

Keeping Score investigates the compelling stories behind and intertwined with classical music. Regardless of your musical background, the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas are ready to conduct you through the fascinating history and modern interpretations of these masterworks.

Open details →

How can marks on a 150‐year‐old page transform into the unflinching emotion of Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony? From decoding the score, to uncovering Tchaikovsky's history, Michael Tilson Thomas gives us a backstage pass to the making of a performance.

Open details →

A documentary on American composer George Antheil (1900-1959) featuring excerpts from Leger's Ballet Mecanique (1924) for which Antheil wrote the music.

Open details →

Peer into the world of contemporary composer John Adams with this documentary that blends performance footage with insightful interviews and commentary from his collaborators and the master himself. Highlights include performances of Adams's Grammy Award-winning operas “Nixon in China” and “El Niño” and excerpts from Penny Woolcock’s film adaptation of “The Death of Klinghoffer”. Works by Steve Reich and Conlon Nancarrow are also performed by the Ensemble InterContemporain at the Théâtre Musical de Paris-Châtelet.

Open details →

A profile of composer Steve Reich, a leading creator of stripped-down, "minimal" music. The program explores how Reich's music eventually became accessible to the musical audience at large. Included are interviews with the composer himself, and contemporaries, and also performances of some of his works.

Open details →

Bugs and Daffy perform and act out their own version of the classic "Carnival of the Animals."

Open details →

The best in the performing arts from across America and around the world including a diverse programming portfolio of classical music, opera, popular song, musical theater, dance, drama, and performance documentaries.

Open details →