Overview
- His death at home in San Francisco on Wednesday was confirmed by his publicist and the San Francisco Symphony.
- He died of glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer first treated with surgery in 2021 after which he disclosed a recurrence in February 2025.
- He led the San Francisco Symphony from 1995 to 2020 and co-founded Miami’s New World Symphony, after earlier posts with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Buffalo Philharmonic.
- He won 12 Grammy Awards and received a 2019 Kennedy Center Honor, and he broadened classical music’s reach through projects like PBS’s Keeping Score and the YouTube Symphony Orchestra.
- The orchestra will dedicate Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony concerts in June to him and is planning a memorial, as tributes also note the February death of his husband and manager, Joshua Robison.