“People found out I was not the model of a nice Jewish boy,” he said. “The event pushed me from wunderkind to desperado. It hurt, and I probably did not get some jobs I might have gotten, but hurt is important and instructive for a musician.”
He forged on, appearing with major orchestras, growing increasingly in demand and making recordings, more than 120 over his career, earning 12 Grammy Awards overall.
Some who followed his career wondered why Mr. Thomas never landed at one of the so-called “Big Five” American orchestras of New York, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago and Philadelphia. But others saw him in the vanguard of a shift that turned the two major West Coast ensembles — the San Francisco Symphony, under Mr. Thomas, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, under Esa-Pekka Salonen and then Gustavo Dudamel — into the dynamic leaders of a re-energized American orchestral scene, in which the “Big Five” designation had been rendered irrelevant.
Ever since his association with Tanglewood, Mr. Thomas worried for the futures of talented musicians in the insecure world of classical music. In 1987, he realized a dream. With the support of Ted Arison, the owner of a cruise ship line who had once hoped to become a concert pianist, he founded the New World Symphony, a professional training academy based in Miami. The academy’s fellows have a three-year residency, in which they work on orchestra programs with Mr. Thomas and other conductors, present some 70 concerts a year, receive chamber music coaching and hone their auditioning skills. Mr. Thomas was its artistic director until March 2022.
Mr. Thomas spoke of the New World Symphony in 2007 as a place for young players to take a sort of musical Hippocratic oath: “‘I will do this because of my love of learning and caring about people,’” as he phrased it, “as opposed to, ‘I can become such a star plastic surgeon that I can have a 19-car garage.’”
The academy could be a “launching pad for people’s lives,” he said.
“My personal mission,” he said, “is to have them hold onto ‘What does this mean?’ I’m trying to give the larger message of what music is all about.”
