Every day doesn’t bring the chance to interview a set of initials. But when the American conductor Michael Tilson Thomas is concerned, initials are unavoidable. Not only is he known as MTT, in public now as well as in private, his orchestra of 12 years is the SFS, the San Francisco Symphony.

Streamlined initials for an up-tempo, high-tech age. And more than most conductors and orchestras, MTT and SFS are multimedia entities. The conventional concerts and tours (they’re just about to tour Europe) jostle with television, DVD and radio, education projects, bustling interactive websites.

He’s happy about the abbreviation. “People wanted to call me Maestro, but I just feel so old. MTT is perfect. And of course my name had already been changed from its original form.” The family name was Thomashevsky – the surname of his illustrious grandfather, the Yiddish actor Boris Thomashevsky, who established Yiddish theatre in the US, where he and his actress wife Bessie carried the out-size celebrity aura of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. MTT’s father, Ted, had cut the name short for his own lively, if humbler, career: assisting the young Orson Welles’s stage activities in the 1930s, working on Roy Rogers westerns, writing TV episodes of Lassie.

But cutting the syllables never meant cutting the family heritage. In 2005 in San Francisco, MTT mounted a concert season, Of Thee I Sing: Yiddish Theatre, Broadway and the American Voice, and he sees all his music-making as linked to his roots.

“Back in the Ukraine, my family were village musicians, making songs about daily village events. The crop harvest. Somebody’s born. Somebody’s died. Somebody’s getting married. What I’m trying to do conducting is create music that connects with daily life in the same way. Within a great Mahler symphony, for instance, there are all these little marches, dances, laconic folk songs, fleeting shreds of things – and they have to be voiced in a way that both respects their origins and puts them to work in a big symphonic plan. I do feel a kinship with Mahler.”

That’s obvious from his award-winning Mahler recordings on the orchestra’s CD label (the latest is a newly mastered Das Klagende Lied, first issued in 1996). Mahler’s Seventh Symphony is in his luggage for this tour, along with other core parts of MTT’s repertory. There’s romantic excess (Deborah Voigt and the final scene from Strauss’s Salome). There’s Tchaikovsky’s Winter Daydreams symphony (“I’ve always loved that symphony. It’s like Tchaikovsky’s take on Mendelssohn”). He waves the stars and stripes too, with Charles Ives’ Third Symphony.

Granted, it’s comparatively conservative luggage for someone who 35 years ago pounded the keyboards in Steve Reich and John Cage. But he’s older (62 now). His hair’s shorter. Goals change. And he remains one of the most open of conductors, happy to be adventurous when it suits. Herbert Blomstedt, his San Francisco predecessor, had whipped the orchestra into a very disciplined band, but at a cost to their initiative. With MTT, they found it again.

“I encouraged the orchestra to play in a freer, more colouristic and gestural way. I want them to feel anything is possible, that they can make the most subtle and personal sounds in their orchestral playing, just as they would if they were playing solo.”

You get a crisp picture of MTT’s working ways in his Keeping Score DVDs (there are four to date). Their aim is to open up specific pieces (the Eroica symphony, The Rite of Spring) for younger people or older ones in need of guidance – though even adults who know the ropes will pick up new insights. He’s a natural communicator, and chooses words wisely. Copland’s Piano Variations, he says in one DVD, deals out its notes “like tough cards in a poker game”.

Like all top conductors, his schedule is impossibly crowded – apart from the SFS, there’s his orchestral academy in Florida (the New World Symphony), guest engagements, time for composing, chilling out in the desert. Plus the gym. God, he’s fit. But the SFS are still special. Family, almost. So how does he communicate with his family? There’s no barking of orders. “It’s more like the relationship between a producer/director and a great actor. You wouldn’t tell a great actor he should say every third word louder, every sixth word faster. You’d be talking entirely about issues of motivation, questions of timing, ensemble balance.”

What’s the relationship, I ask him, when the conductor and the composer are the same, when they’re playing a new Tilson Thomas piece – a successor to his Poems of Emily Dickinson song-cycle or From the Diary of Anne Frank? “There’s one problem. I can labour mightily in other composers’ cause. But it’s difficult to do that with my own music. If it doesn’t immediately sound wonderful I want to take the whole thing and throw it.”

Hard to imagine him doing that. For MTT gets things done. And his luggage is packed; he’s on his way.

The SFS appear at the Edinburgh International Festival on Aug 29 and 30 (www.eif.co.uk 0131-473 2000), Aug 29, 30, and at the Proms on Sept 1 and 2 (www.bbc.co.uk/proms 020-7589 8212) Sept 1, 2

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