Conductor, composer, and educator Michael Tilson Thomas has led the world’s great orchestras to tremendous acclaim for nearly half a century. Since his 1995 appointment as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, he has taken the orchestra to glorious heights, premiering new music, invigorating familiar works, and launching multimedia initiatives. As a music educator, he has shared his passion by founding the New World Symphony, an orchestral academy for graduates of prestigious music programs. He will continue to shape young artists when he directs Carnegie Hall’s National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America (NYO-USA) during the summer of 2018. His compositions have been performed around the world, many premiering at the Hall during his two-season Perspectives series (2003–2005). He was also artistic director of Carnegie Hall’s 2011–2012 American Mavericks series in which he conducted the San Francisco Symphony in music by groundbreaking composers. Tilson Thomas returns to Carnegie Hall for his second Perspectives, highlighting many facets of his renowned career.

In the summer before the 2018–2019 season, Tilson Thomas leads NYO-USA in a performance at Carnegie Hall and a tour to Asia. In October, he opens the Hall’s season with the San Francisco Symphony in a concert that features renowned vocalists and frequent collaborators Renée Fleming and Audra McDonald. The next night, he leads the orchestra in an all-Stravinsky program. He returns in March for two concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, including performances of works by Ives and Mahler—composers for whom he has a special affinity. His Perspectives culminates in May with the New World Symphony. Orchestra alumni return to perform with him in the first concert, which also includes fellow Perspectives artist Yuja Wang in Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 5, while the second concert includes soprano Measha Brueggergosman and one of Tilson Thomas’s most recent compositions.