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Metallica wrote a tribute to the late conductor and composer in an Instagram post on Thursday Michael Tilson Thomas paid their last respects. The classical music titan led the San Francisco Symphony in collaborating with the band at the 2019 S&M2 concerts. Thomas died on Wednesday, April 22nd. In 2026, at the age of 81 after a battle with brain cancer, the New York Times reported.
“It is with great sadness that we learned of the death of the legendary conductor Michael Tilson Thomas,” the band wrote, describing the conductor known as MTT as “a towering figure in classical music” – and the driving force behind the concerts.
“MTT was more than a conductor: an accomplished pianist and composer, he served as musical director of the San Francisco Symphony for 25 years,” the band wrote. “During this time, he brought innovation, experimentation and community engagement to San Francisco. He promoted contemporary music by building relationships with living composers and reimagining the standard repertoire with fresh interpretations. He won twelve Grammy Awards throughout his career.”
Great honor at the podium
“We really valued our time with MTT and learned so much from him while preparing the S&M2 performances – it was a very great honor to have him at the helm for our shows,” they continued. “We will miss him very much.”
These concerts were a continuation of Metallica’s original “Symphony & Metallica” (S&M for short) concerts with conductor Michael Kamen in 1999. What MTT did differently than Kamen, however, was that he sought out classical repertoire that Metallica could play with the orchestra, rather than just having the orchestra accompany the band. At the concerts, the Symphony played Sergei Prokofiev’s “Scythian Suite, Opus 20 II: The Enemy God and the Dance of the Dark Spirits” – and then Metallica joined for an arrangement of Alexander Mosolow’s “The Iron Foundry, Opus 19.”
“The moment MTT suggested it, the whole thing just had this rock collaboration energy,” Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich told Rolling Stone in 2019. “About a week before rehearsals started, MTT and his team came to our HQ and we just started going through the piece… And suddenly I found this beat or this drum pattern, Kirk [Hammett] started playing this crazy melody, James started doing his punchy riff thing – and then there was no stopping it.”
Industrial machine made of sound
“It’s just incredible to watch the orchestra go through all the different cycles and build the whole thing until it sounds like an industrial machine,” Hammett said. “I would have liked to play a guitar solo there, but I think I jumped on the bandwagon too late.”
Thomas spoke to ROLLING STONE at the concerts about the connection he sees between classical music and Metallica’s work. “Some of the pieces we play in the second half of the show come from the Soviet era, when there was so much interest in ‘primitivism’ and ‘futurism’ – and many of those pieces contain a lot of the same elements that are in what Metallica does,” he said. “It was a lot of fun introducing them to this material. They enjoy it and want to play along.”
He also commented on the feeling he and the Symphony experienced while playing with the band. “What we absolutely cannot imagine in classical music is the audience reaction,” MTT said. “Before the song even starts, we get what we would normally call a standing ovation. It’s just huge. We had to learn that 19,000 people screaming at the top of their lungs can create a whole other level of noise that you have to navigate your way through.”
