And here we thought MTT's hero was Aaron Copland.
Listen to the story of the 2006 encounter between the two maestri on the SF Symphony website Keeping Score.
We already liked him, coz Michael Tilson Thomas is a great maestro and unduly underrated outside of the US; today he gained a lot of points in the cool department, though.
And seriously, "I'm trying to get them excited, watching their faces, to show the unknown" could easily be a Mozart quote as well (his century's hardest working man in showbusiness, by the way).