MA Top 30 Professional: Joshua Robison

General Manager
MTT Inc.

Joshua Robison and Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) have been together almost 50 years (they were married in 2014), with Thomas ever ascending as a dazzling star conductor/composer while Robison, his partner and manager, as the level-headed protector and guide behind the scenes. “I’m right in the middle of the fray,” Robison says of his role amid the constellation of management companies, record labels, orchestras, and other institutions revolving around Thomas. “I don’t write the contracts,
but I certainly review them. A lot of what I do is nudge things along. I make it possible for things to happen that Michael wants to have happen.”

Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1950s, the two first met in their school orchestra in North Hollywood, with Robison, 11, playing cello, and Thomas, 12, on oboe and piano. As Thomas went on to pursue his musical destiny, Robison honed his talent as a gymnast at the University of California, Berkeley, winning an NCAA championship on the rings in 1967. “Because I had that moment of fame, I never felt the need to have my name in the forefront,” says Robison, whose flutist sister, Paula Robison, is a founding member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Robison was closely involved in the many programs MTT initiated during his 25-year music directorship of the San Francisco Symphony, such as the Keeping Score documentaries and MTT Files radio series. Recently, he was executive producer of Grace, a handsome four-CD box set of Thomas compositions on the Pentatone label. The 1987 co-founding by MTT (with Lin and Ted Arison, the Carnival Cruise magnate) and development of the New World Symphony in Miami, where young musicians
receive post-graduate orchestra training, remains a proud achievement for Robison and Thomas.

In 2021, MTT was diagnosed with brain cancer, but he continues to conduct a select number of concerts, often of Mahler symphonies. “What we have to be careful about now is that we don’t dream too big,” Robison says. “We’re at that stage of life where you want to contribute things, and realize you still have something to offer, but we can’t be empire building at this point.”