JTA — One year ago, Michael Tilson Thomas lifted his baton to conduct a concert in San Francisco that he said would be his last .

The scion of Yiddish theater and luminary of contemporary classical music had been diagnosed with a recurrence of brain cancer, and he knew his days were numbered.

“We all get to say the old show business expression, ‘It’s a wrap,’” he said on his website after conducting Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 with the San Francisco Symphony, one of several orchestras he led during his storied career. He signed off: “Life is precious.”

Thomas died Wednesday at his home in San Francisco, four days short of the one-year anniversary of that concert.…