On Disc, the Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas Is Prolifically Himself

The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas has always had a way with words, but one refrain of his is especially memorable.

“I have encouraged people to color outside the lines, for lack of a better analogy,” he told The New York Times in 2017, in announcing his departure from the San Francisco Symphony after a quarter century as its lauded music director. “We’re not trying to reproduce the notation here. We’re trying to get back to the inspiration that caused the notations to exist.”

Coloring outside the lines has been a way of life for Thomas, who, living with a terminal glioblastoma diagnosis from 2021, will turn 80 on Saturday. He has shown a certain freedom, a refusal to conform, a celebration of exuberance. Combined with a sprinkling of showmanship and a basic faith in the modern, these convictions have made Thomas, affectionately known as M.T.T., a crucial part of musical life for over five decades.

How has that philosophy fared on record? There’s an argument that to ask the question at all is to somewhat miss the point. If Thomas has been anything, he has been a live musician, a man of the theater whose mind has feasted on the parallels and juxtapositions that tend to be much more possible in the concert hall than in the studio. Joshua Kosman, a longtime critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, recently noted that “it’s the fleeting and protean quality of the event that corresponds, perhaps paradoxically, to M.T.T.’s deepest artistic commitments.” Records, for better and for worse, last forever.

Thomas conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra around 1970.Credit…Boston Symphony Orchestra Archive

Even so, Thomas has been a dedicated, prolific, important recording artist, as a pair of new box sets that collect much of his legacy confirm. From Sony, there comes an 80-disc compendium of recordings he made for the Columbia, Sony and RCA labels, chiefly as the music director or principal conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic (1971-79), the London Symphony (1988-95), and the San Francisco Symphony (1995-2020). If the Sony set is a monument to the breadth of his interests, a 14-disc Eloquence compilation of Deutsche Grammophon and Argo releases is more of a diamond cut in his honor, sparkling with the precocity of his whiz-kid years with the Boston Symphony, and shining with the inquisitive enthusiasm of the young players of the New World Symphony, which he founded in 1987.