By Jonathan Blumhofer

This album fills out Michael Tilson Thomas’s compositional catalogue, deepening our appreciation of it. More fundamentally, it adds meaningfully to the story of American concert music.

Many, the Bible tells us, are called. Few are chosen.

As any New Testament scholar will tell you, that wasn’t a reference to important conductors who also prove to be significant composers. But perhaps this once we can reapply the sentiment in that direction.

Michael Tilson Thomas – MTT, as he’s colloquially known – has been among the preeminent of the former for well over fifty years. Towards the end of his quarter-century term at the helm of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS), he released an album of his own music on the orchestra’s in-house label, SFS Media.

If that came as a surprise, it shouldn’t have. Tilson Thomas has been an active composer for much of his career, even as his work on the podium showcasing Ives, Gershwin, Mahler, Beethoven, American Mavericks, and more has generally overshadowed this aspect of his musicianship.

Now, though, there’s no escaping the Maestro’s compositional accomplishments. In honor of his upcoming 80^th birthday in December, Pentatone is out with Grace, a compendium of Tilson Thomas’s compositions spanning the 1970s to the present day.

Drawn from archival and new recordings, it showcases an artist whose output is, like his discography, hard to pin down. MTT eschews easy labels. Yet despite the polyglot stylistic diversity on offer and the chameleon-like fluency of his technique, a few common themes do emerge.

First of all, he’s a natural-born song writer. Given his family history (Tilson Thomas’s grandparents were Yiddish theater stars Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky), this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

Still, the assurance with which he inhabits the blues, jazz, and Tin Pan Alley in “Sentimental Again” and the easy charm of “Not Everyone Thinks That I’m Beautiful” – which is precisely the sort of thing Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green might have teamed up to write – is something special. So is the riotous “Symphony Cowgirl,” in which the composer ably channels, of all things, symphonic country & western music.

The other big takeaway from this set is also, given the context, an unsurprising one: MTT is a consummate man of the theater. This comes out most clearly in Diary of Anne Frank (the performance here was included on the 2020 SFS release) and Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind.

The last is a 2016 setting of Carl Sandburg for vocal combo, bar band, and chamber orchestra, that manages to fuse together Mahler, Copland, James Brown, and more. Chic, urbane, filled with bold contrasts of tone, style, and mood, Four Preludes proves a revelation – thanks in no small part to the thoroughly inhabited performance it gets from Measha Brueggergosman-Lee and the New World Symphony.

These theatrical tendencies also carry over into some of the more abstract instrumental selections. Agnegram, a rollicking, exuberant curtain raiser might not know quite when or where to stop, but it’s good-natured and clever in all the right ways.

So is Urban Legend, a contrabassoon concerto heard here in a version for baritone saxophone featuring the fearless Pat Posey. Edgy, rhythmic, what one might imagine John Adams writing if he chose to stare down a tune, Legend brims with robust low-tessitura solo writing and a vigorous, sometimes frenetic orchestral accompaniment. The music never forgets to dance, though, and its whimsical ending comes as a true surprise.

The remaining orchestral selections on Grace are impressively varied.

There are three song cycles: Whitman Songs, Poems of Emily Dickinson, and Meditations on Rilke. The latter was featured along with Anne Frank in 2020; it’s instructive to hear it now in the company of its predecessors.

The earliest of them, Whitman, runs from crabby and syncopated in “Who Goes There?” to airy in “At Ship’s Helm” and snapping proudly in “We Two Boys Together Clinging.” Thomas Hampson navigates them all with aplomb.

For their part, the Dickinson settings offer a model of inventive writing for both voice and orchestra. Composed for Renée Fleming, the cycle forms a lovely, knowing showcase of the soprano’s instrument. Whether channeling Ivesian devotion in “Of God We Ask One Favor,” the jazzy shadowlands of “Fame,” or the Copland-esque heights of “Take All Away From Me,” Fleming’s command of MTT’s sumptuous and wide-ranging vocal lines is captivating.

So is the orchestral writing, which evinces a huge range of colors and textures. Most notable is the penultimate song, a collection of three poems under the heading “Nature Studies,” whose instrumental transparency and wit is fully on par with Dickinson’s genius.

Filling out the assemblage are some hits – Street Song, a touching brass quintet heard here in its arrangement for symphonic brass complement; Upon Further Reflection, a significant essay for solo piano; and Notturno, a lilting, reflective meditation for flute and strings – as well as some misses.

The gamelan-inspired Island Music may come off well in performance (it closes with a thoroughly cathartic “Ride Out”), but, disembodied on disc, it meanders. Likewise, Lope, despite a charming premise (dog walking) doesn’t add up to the sum of its parts.

Nevertheless, Grace makes and leaves a strong impression, both by way of its musical content and its performers. In addition to the individuals and ensembles mentioned above, the Bay Brass; vocalists Sasha Cooke, Ryan McKinny, Audra McDonald, Isabel Leonard, Carrie VanSlyke, and Lisa Vroman; flautist Paula Robison; percussionists Nancy Zeltsman and Jack Van Geem; trombonist Ian Bousfield; conductor Edwin Outwater; and pianists Jeremy VanSlyke, John Wilson, and Jean-Yves Thibaudet are featured.

That those involved have waived royalties says something, too. As a note at the end of the set’s handsome booklet points out, all proceeds from the album’s sales will be donated to brain cancer research at the UCSF Brain Tumor Center, where MTT was first treated for a glioblastoma multiforme diagnosis more than three years ago.

While the reality of that illness shadows this release and the conductor’s subsequent appearances, Tilson Thomas’s enormous podium legacy is secure. As Grace demonstrates, his compositional catalogue fills out and deepens our appreciation of it. More fundamentally, it adds meaningfully to the story of American concert music.

Perhaps its most timely and important message – and one that beautifully tracks with the open-faced optimism of MTT’s public persona – comes by way of the title track, a song written for Leonard Bernstein’s 70^th birthday in 1988. It speaks with special poignance now: “Make us grateful for whatever comes next,” the lyric runs, “In this life on earth we’re sharing/For the truth is life is good.”

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Jonathan Blumhofer is a composer and violist who has been active in the greater Boston area since 2004. His music has received numerous awards and been performed by various ensembles, including the American Composers Orchestra, Kiev Philharmonic, Camerata Chicago, Xanthos Ensemble, and Juventas New Music Group. Since receiving his doctorate from Boston University in 2010, Jon has taught at Clark University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and online for the University of Phoenix, in addition to writing music criticism for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.