Metallica paid tribute to the late conductor and composer Michael Tilson Thomas, a classical music titan who led the San Francisco Symphony when collaborating with the band on its 2019 S&M2 concerts, in an Instagram post on Thursday. Thomas died at age 81 Wednesday after a battle with brain cancer, according to The New York Times.
“It is with great sadness that we learned of the passing of legendary conductor Michael Tilson Thomas,” Metallica wrote, describing the conductor, known as MTT, as “a towering figure in classical music” and recognizing him as a driving force behind the concerts.
“MTT was more than a conductor; an accomplished pianist and composer, he served as the San Francisco Symphony’s musical director for 25 years,” the band wrote. “During his time with the orchestra, he brought innovation, experimentation, and community engagement to San Francisco. He fostered contemporary music by forming relationships with living composers and creating fresh accounts of standard repertory. Throughout his career, he earned 12 Grammy Awards.
“We cherished our time with MTT and learned so much working with him to prepare the S&M2 performances; it was a very high honor to have him on the podium for our shows,” they continued. “He will be sorely missed.”
Those concerts were a sequel to Metallica’s original “Symphony & Metallica” (S&M for short) concerts with conductor Michael Kamen from 1999. What MTT did differently from Kamen, though, was he found classical repertoire for Metallica to perform with the symphony, rather than have the orchestra merely accompany the group. At the concert, the symphony performed conductor Sergei Prokoviev’s “Scythian Suite, Opus 20 II: The Enemy God and the Dance of the Dark Spirits” for the audience and then Metallica joined them for an arrangement of composer Alexander Mosolov’s “The Iron Foundry, Opus 19.”
“The minute MTT suggested it, the whole thing just oozed rock collaboration,” Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich told Rolling Stone in 2019. “About a week before the rehearsals started, MTT and his team came out to HQ and we started just going through it. … And all of a sudden, there was a beat or a drum pattern I hit upon, and Kirk [Hammett] started doing that crazy melody and James started doing his chunky riff thing and it was off to the races.”
“It’s amazing just to watch the orchestra go through all the different cycles of it and build it up so it sounds like an industrial machine,” Hammett said. “I would have liked to have done a guitar solo in it, but I think I was too late to the game for that.”
Thomas spoke with Rolling Stone at the concerts, describing the connection he sees between classical and Metallica’s music. “Some of the pieces we’re doing in the second half of the show, these are pieces that come from the Soviet period, when there was such interest in ‘primitivism’ and ‘futurism’ and many of these pieces contain a lot of the elements that are involved in what Metallica does,” he said. “It’s been great fun introducing that material to them, and they’re enjoying it and wanting to play along with it.”
He also commented on the feeling he and the symphony felt when performing with the band. “The thing we absolutely can’t imagine in classical music is the response from the audience,” MTT said. “Before the song even begins, we’re experiencing what we would normally think of as a standing ovation. It’s just huge. We’ve had to learn that 19,000 people screaming at the top of their lungs can produce a whole other level of sound you have to work your way through.”
