The Complete Columbia, Sony, and RCA Recordings

Sony's 80-CD box set now, for the first time, collects the entire discography Michael Tilson Thomas amassed for RCA, CBS and Sony Classical between 1973 and 2005. He was Leonard Bernstein's most famous protégé, and it's convenient to draw parallels between two prodigiously gifted pianists, composers and charismatic explicators who became the leading American conductor of their respective generations. Like his mentor from the East Coast, Michael Tilson Thomas, born and bred on the West Coast, has been an eloquent champion of Mahler, Gershwin, Ives and Copland; he is also equally at home in the standard European repertoire, Broadway musicals and jazz; and he is a passionate, eloquent teacher - in the 1970s he took over Bernstein's Young People's Concerts. MTT - as he is affectionately known almost everywhere by now - has become one of the world's best-loved musical figures and most successful recording artists, with a dozen Grammys to his credit.