The sound of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra in afternoon rehearsal fills the upper tiers of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. The piece is Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, and though the musicians are dressed in shorts and jeans, not their black-tie concert attire, the performance is of nighttime caliber. Had the same performance been heard that evening, crowds would have leapt to their feet.
But only one man is standing, and he isn’t pleased. In polo shirt and black slacks, he does not cut a commanding figure. With his quick, waddling gait, when hunched forward in tails, he sometimes resembles the penguin toys he is known to collect. Yet when he merely drops his hands and starts to speak, the orchestra stops in midbreath, the last note still resonating in the Schermerhorn’s acoustically perfect silence.
“This doesn’t sound good at all,” says Leonard Slatkin.
As always, Slatkin—one of the world’s foremost conductors and, a little bit closer to home, music advisor to the NSO—conducts with beautiful, clear gesture. The musicians respond with playing that is rhythmically incisive and gorgeous in tone. To the untrained ear, the performance of course sounds fantastic. In a great hall, everything sounds wonderful. Even coughing.
But conductors don’t hear like the rest of us. In their heads, they hear every quarter note a beat ahead of everyone else. They don’t want musicians just to play the written note; they want musicians to play that note, the one only the conductor can hear. And what Slatkin hears at the moment is a slight flaw in timbre—imperceptible to any casual listener, but as detectable to him as a dog-whistle to a pointer.
Among other things, Slatkin is clearly unimpressed with the orchestra’s small stage organ. “Can you try something else? Can you add another stop?”
The organist immediately scrambles for new sounds, fumbling with his keyboard like a nervous high schooler looking for lost homework. But nothing satisfies the conductor’s exacting ear. “Well, you’re going to have to come up with something that sounds like an actual pipe organ before the concert,” Slatkin cautions, “because right now this isn’t cutting it.”
Finding the right organ sound usually isn’t a problem in the Mussorgsky. Most conductors perform French composer Maurice Ravel’s famous arrangement, which doesn’t employ a pipe organ at all. But Leonard Slatkin isn’t “most conductors.” He is rehearsing the orchestra in one of his own concoctions: a Pictures at an Exhibition featuring the work of no fewer than 14 different arrangers. It’s a real orchestral grab-bag: a motley mix of prismatic charm, blatant bombast and film-score cliché with a finale—Douglas Gamley’s over-the-top arrangement of “The Great Gate of Kiev”—that calls for both a pipe organ à la Vincent Price and a large men’s choir singing darkly in Russian.
Mussorgsky’s original score, by contrast, was a simple piano solo.
Slatkin’s strange orchestral stew didn’t necessarily make for an exercise in taste. And yet, like a binge at Krispy Kreme, its excess was great fun. When the result was played, brilliantly, on June 21 before more than 1,400 delegates of the American Symphony Orchestra League, it had the desired effect.
“We were out to show the entire classical music industry that we were a much better orchestra than most people thought,” says Alan Valentine, the NSO’s president. “And I think we blew everyone away.”
“I heard a lot of praise from league delegates,” adds Martha Ingram, chairman of the NSO’s board of directors and, more importantly, its billionaire benefactor. “But they were also expressing disbelief. They couldn’t believe our orchestra could sound so good.”
Actually, the NSO’s concert did more than impress. It revealed a miracle—a veritable artistic resurrection. In 1988, this spunky (yet at the time strictly mediocre) little orchestra declared bankruptcy, re-emerging seven years later with little money in the bank, a miserable concert hall and low institutional self-esteem.
Fast forward to 2007. The orchestra has an acoustically marvelous new concert hall, the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, named for the orchestra’s late, beloved music director, Kenneth Schermerhorn, who died in April 2005. The ensemble currently has an important recording contract, something almost unheard of in contemporary classical music.
And it has Leonard Slatkin.
“I can’t overstate the importance of having Leonard as our music advisor,” says Valentine. “It’s bought us precious time to search for a permanent music director. And it’s given us clout. In fact, before Leonard became our advisor last summer, there were a number of European conductors who wouldn’t give us the time of day. Then suddenly, we started getting calls from their agents saying, ‘You know, it looks like so-and-so is available to guest-conduct your orchestra after all.’ Yeah, right.”
Of course, what’s suddenly made Nashville attractive to highbrow Eurotrash is the Slatkin legend. That is based mostly on his extraordinarily successful 17-year tenure as music director of the St. Louis Symphony. The son of a renowned and highly competitive Hollywood orchestra musician, Slatkin took a second-tier Midwestern group and whipped it into an ensemble that was routinely compared to orchestras in New York, Boston and Chicago. By the time he left St. Louis for that other NSO—the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C.—Slatkin was often mentioned as being on the short list to take over orchestras in either New York or Chicago.
Yet once in D.C., Slatkin’s career eventually went south, with his tenure often marred by harsh reviews. “I’d love to be able to say that my time in Washington has been an unqualified success, but it hasn’t been,” Slatkin himself admits. One longtime Slatkin observer goes even further: “I’m not sure he’s on anyone’s short list for an important post now.”
Except Nashville. Whether the NSO is a big post or not, it could reaffirm Slatkin’s power as an orchestra builder and restore luster to a recent career that some consider clouded. Aside from the prestige of his famous name, he brings something else that Nashville’s orchestra desperately needs: polish.
“Kenneth [Schermerhorn] was a great inspiration, but he wasn’t a great technician,” says a veteran NSO musician. “But Leonard has a great technique. His beat is beautifully clear, so our rhythm is better. And since our rhythm is better, our ensemble is tighter, and so we play more in tune. Everything is better, and everyone in the orchestra I’ve talked to is really excited about it.”
So Slatkin is a miracle for the NSO—but what exactly does he get out of the deal? It’s certainly not the money. In Washington, where he ends an 11-year tenure at the conclusion of the 2007-08 season, Slatkin earns a cool $1.2 million a year, according to the National Symphony Orchestra’s most recent tax filings with the IRS. And there’s no way a midsize orchestra like Nashville can afford that kind of dough.
“But for Slatkin it’s not about the money,” says one orchestra expert. “It’s about career redemption. Look, Slatkin is now at an age—62—where he’s thinking about his legacy. After Washington, that legacy isn’t looking so good. But if he can come to a place like Nashville and build that orchestra the way he built St. Louis, then it could redeem his legacy. It would also be a way of giving those creeps in Washington the middle finger, proving they were wrong all along. But to do that he needs another success like St. Louis.”
If, as Frank McCourt wrote, “the happy childhood is hardly worth your while,” then Leonard Slatkin had a worthy upbringing. In demeanor, Slatkin prefers to play the role of the high-society gentleman. There is a formal elegance to his conversation—he doesn’t talk about an airplane being late but rather about the “fragility of air travel.” And there’s self-deprecating humor in his banter. “My main career goal this summer is to lose 15 pounds,” he says.
He grew up in a musical household to be sure. Pretty much everybody in St. Louis knew, or at least claimed to know, the Slatkins. His father Felix grew up in St. Louis, studied the violin there and eventually became assistant concertmaster at the city’s orchestra. But in 1937, after being refused a $5 weekly raise, Felix Slatkin quit and moved to what was then the best place on earth for a classical musician: Hollywood.
At the time, Hollywood had become something of a refugee city for the great European classical musicians who had fled the Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions. And of course, the great composers of Hollywood’s Golden Age were in town—Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Waxman, Miklós Rózsa, among others—creating some truly unforgettable music for the film industry. “If you want to hear great orchestra music, you’ve got to listen to the string sounds on those great 1930s and ’40s soundtracks,” says Slatkin. “It’s utterly sensuous.”
In the late 1930s, orchestra players usually struggled to make any money, but in Hollywood any half-decent musician could earn a respectable living. Felix Slatkin’s talent was of the first magnitude. He could do it all: play violin, conduct, arrange, compose. He quickly landed a spot as concertmaster at Twentieth Century Fox. His wife, the brilliant cellist Eleanor Aller, became principal cellist at Warner Brothers. When he wasn’t at the studio, Felix Slatkin kept busy conducting the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra and the Concert Arts Chamber Orchestra. He also became concertmaster for Frank Sinatra. It was into this world, on Sept. 1, 1944, that Leonard Slatkin was born.
In 1947, his parents founded the world-famous Hollywood String Quartet. It included Felix Slatkin on first violin, Eleanor Aller on cello, Paul Shure on second violin and—alternately—Paul Robyn and Alvin Dinkin on viola. Leonard Slatkin’s first musical memory is of this ensemble playing the Quartet No. 6 of Heitor Villa-Lobos.
“My parents would come home from work at the studios, usually in the late afternoon, and we would have dinner,” Slatkin says. “There were two subjects we would talk about, music and baseball, and that was about it. They otherwise didn’t have much to do with me and my brother, and we were both essentially raised by housekeepers. After dinner, the quartet would show up, and they’d spend the evening rehearsing. I can still remember sitting on the stairs listening to them practice, falling asleep listening to the late Beethoven quartets or to Schubert.”
Naturally in that house, Leonard Slatkin began musical studies at an early age. But the awesome talents of his parents mostly provided the younger Slatkin with an almost endless source of intimidation.
“You have to understand that my family was extremely competitive,” says Slatkin. “I started playing violin at about age 3, but even then I knew I’d never be as good as my dad, so I gave it up. Later on, when I was about 12, I took up piano, but I knew I’d never be as good as my uncle, so I quit. Then around 14 I took up viola, mostly because nobody in our family played viola, and I did that for a while. I also studied composing with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco.
“In high school I occasionally arranged some musicals, but at that point I knew I would never conduct, because my dad was better at that, too. My brother actually had it worse, because he was a cellist. And of course our mom was a cellist, and our granddad. But he stuck it out.” Slatkin’s brother, Frederick, now performs under the Russian spelling of the family name, Zlotkin.
After high school, Slatkin went to Indiana University to study composing, but he got kicked out after one semester because he failed to attend compulsory ROTC class. “I got sick my first week and couldn’t attend ROTC,” Slatkin says. “I told them I would make up the training later, but they were really inflexible about it, so I left.”
Slatkin returned to California to attend Los Angeles City College. “I had every intention of studying English and becoming an English teacher.” A month after he got back, though, his father Felix died.
“I was 19 years old and he was only 47,” Slatkin remembers. “But he was an alcoholic and smoked three packs of cigarettes a day and had a heart attack. You know, it’s only been in the last few years that I finally began to understand things. Maybe my mom and dad really weren’t such great parents after all, but we survived. I also know that if my father hadn’t died when he did, I never would have become a conductor.”
It was after his father’s death that Slatkin made the connection that would launch his career. After deciding to become a conducting student at the Aspen Music Festival, he came under the tutelage of the noted conductor Walter Susskind in 1964. Thanks to Susskind, Slatkin got into the Juilliard School of Music. When his former professor took over the helm of St. Louis’ acclaimed orchestra, he invited 23-year-old Leonard—then boyish, fresh out of school and almost completely untried—to serve as assistant conductor to the group his father had quit three decades before.
“My first year on the job, I think I conducted something like 83 children’s concerts alone,” Slatkin says. “To this day I’m astounded by how much I did.”
St. Louis may not be the first place that comes to mind when you think of symphony towns. All the same, this bastion of Midwestern sensibility boasts the second-oldest orchestra in the country, right after New York. Joseph Otten, a German organist, founded the group in 1880, naming it the St. Louis Choral Society. Though the group had been recording since the 1920s, it didn’t really come into its own until 1931, when conductor Vladimir Golschmann took charge. It was Golschmann, who remained with the orchestra until 1958—and who employed Slatkin’s father—who first established St. Louis as a respected regional orchestra.
Interestingly, Slatkin’s most important early experience didn’t take place behind a podium, but rather behind a microphone. During the brief hiatus of a six-week musicians’ strike, Slatkin was invited to do a radio interview. It was there that he discovered his virtuoso voice.
“I started out life being as shy as shy can be,” the conductor remembers. “In fact, I was so shy that I had serious doubts about whether I’d even be able to function in this very public business. But I did this interview with public radio, and the next thing you know they were offering me a regular show. For the next three years I did a weekly four-hour show, and it was behind a microphone, where I didn’t have to worry about being shy, that I learned how to speak. In essence, it gave me another tool, and it became a signature. And back then you didn’t have any other conductors besides [Leonard] Bernstein who were known as talkers.”
After learning to talk and paying his assistant-conductor dues, Slatkin finally got his big break in 1974, when he was called in at the last minute to substitute with orchestras in New York, Chicago and London. “I did well, and after that became more marketable,” he says. Indeed, Slatkin eventually went on to outdo even the great talker Bernstein when he became the first native-born American to conduct all of the so-called “Big Five” orchestras—New York, Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Chicago. But he still had one more test.
“This isn’t very well known now, but in the mid-’70s I spent two years as music director of the New Orleans Symphony,” Slatkin recalls. “At the time, I had this mentor named John Edwards, who was general manager of the Chicago Symphony, who guided me in everything I did. When New Orleans came up, he told me, ‘You’re going to take it, but I’m not going to tell you why. Just go.’ Well, it turned out to be a positively tumultuous two years. The orchestra was a mess, and the administration was a mess, and I found myself making all sorts of decisions I never knew I was qualified to make.
“When the two years was up, job offers from orchestras in Minneapolis, Cincinnati and St. Louis came in, and I asked John Edwards for his advice. He said, ‘Oh, you’re going back to St. Louis.’ I asked him why he had sent me to New Orleans, and he asked, ‘Well, why do you think?’ I said, ‘Because you wanted me to learn that I had right stuff to be a music director.’ And he said, ‘You got it.’ So I went back to St. Louis, which had always been a second home.”
Leonard Slatkin did more than just become music director of the St. Louis Symphony in 1979. For all intents and purposes, he became Mr. St. Louis. It was said that he probably knew—and had shaken hands with—every man, woman and child in the city. He knew all the back roads in town and in the suburbs, knew where the best Italian restaurants and custard stands were, knew everything about his beloved St. Louis Cardinals, whose games he would fanatically follow during intermission at Powell Symphony Hall.
“Back then I believed that a music director had to be part and parcel of his community in every way,” says Slatkin. “That’s part of the reason we were successful, but in truth we succeeded because we had a plan. We had a great team, a great administration, and we thought long-term, knowing exactly where we wanted to be five years out, 10 years out. That’s how we did it.”
Slatkin had more than a plan. He had a three-part strategy that was perfectly suited for its day. At home, he would usually lead the orchestra in core repertoire—the Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms that the burghers of St. Louis wanted to hear. On tour, however, he pursued an altogether different strategy. He turned his heartland orchestra into a band that specialized in the works of such modern American icons as Copland, Barber, Bernstein and Gershwin.
“Slatkin really did a wonderful job with all that Americana stuff,” says Philip Kennicott, a former classical critic with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who now writes about culture for The Washington Post. “And some of his recordings of that music are still classics.”
Indeed, the third part of Slatkin’s strategy was to record all the American music his orchestra had played on the road. “We wanted those recordings to make us known around the world as the great American orchestra, and it worked,” says Slatkin. “Of course, that was the height of the recording industry, and at one point we were recording four or five albums a year. We’ll never see those days again.”
It’s worth noting that Slatkin’s commitment to American music wasn’t limited to the classics. During his time in St. Louis, he led 62 world premieres or first American performances. And he became a champion of a new generation of American composers that included such names as Joan Tower, Joseph Schwantner and John Corigliano. Slatkin turned 50 on Sept. 1, 1994, and on the same day he learned his wife was pregnant with a son. On that day, he also decided not to renew his contract with St. Louis.
Slatkin fully expected to spend most of his time on the guest conductor circuit once his contract with St. Louis expired in 1996. But then the nation’s capital came calling. Mstislav Rostropovich, the charismatic Russian cellist who for years had been music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, was retiring. Would Slatkin be interested in the job?
“I was intrigued because this was different from any other opportunity I ever had,” Slatkin says. “Washington, of course, was a tourist destination, but the symphony and the Kennedy Center asked me to come on board as a sort of cultural ambassador, someone who would put the city on the map as a cultural destination as well. I couldn’t pass that up.”
Slatkin got his chance to be the Leonard Bernstein of his generation, a public spokesman for American culture and music. And for a few years, it all seemed to work. He quickly improved the quality of the National Symphony’s playing, adding several much-needed layers of technical polish. He also changed the orchestra’s repertoire to include more American music and more contemporary work. As he did in St. Louis, Slatkin took this music on the road, performing a 20-city European tour in 1997 that received a glorious write-up from Washington Post classical critic Tim Page, one of the field’s most respected writers.
But over time, both Page and fellow Post critic Philip Kennicott began to take issue with Slatkin and the NSO. Kennicott, in particular, had problems with the quality of the NSO’s playing, writing that performances often seemed under-rehearsed.
“Slatkin was a great technician and a quick study, and I admired the way he could effortlessly learn a new and complicated score,” says Kennicott. “My problem with Slatkin was a lack of depth. I was looking for performances, especially of the core repertoire, that seemed deeply considered over a lifetime, and I wasn’t getting that from him.”
Kennicott also took exception with some of Slatkin’s commissions, in particular a Michael Kamen work, commissioned in 2000, called The New Moon in the Old Moon’s Arms. Kennicott blasted the piece when it premiered that January, then drubbed it again in an end-of-the-year piece that described Kamen as a “mediocre composer of film scores” and his music as “a piece so bad that it can stand as an exemplar for the problems the music world faced in the year 2000.”
Slatkin and the National Symphony went ballistic. In an unprecedented move, they posted a condemnation of Kennicott’s piece on the symphony’s website.
“Anyone can express an opinion, but Kennicott just got fact after fact wrong,” says Slatkin, still peeved over the article. “He described Kamen as a Hollywood composer but in truth Kamen lived in London. He called him a hack but in truth he had been a top English horn player at the Juilliard School. Kennicott was all nonsense.”
But what of Tim Page? A Pulitzer Prize winner, Page was widely respected for the depth of his musical knowledge and the elegance of his prose. Like any good critic, of course, Page occasionally bared his fangs. But his bites were rarely envenomed, and his notices were usually generous to a fault. So his review of a National Symphony concert in March 2003, which featured a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No.4, no doubt caused a sting. Particularly because the bite hit a nerve:
“It will doubtless be said that [soprano] Linda Hohenfeld was chosen as the soloist in the last movement of the Mahler because she is, in private life, Mrs. Leonard Slatkin,” Page wrote. “This is true enough, I fear, for it is hard to imagine that the small, quavery soprano voice heard last night would have prevailed over many other candidates in an open audition…. [T]his ‘family affair,’ however well intentioned, proved a disappointing and depressingly provincial way to end a good concert.”
Tearing a page (ahem) from the script of Citizen Kane, Slatkin immediately banished Page from his life. “Tim’s reversal surprised me,” Slatkin says. “He had been one of my biggest supporters.” Page says he felt Slatkin “was the one who turned on me. He’s still not really talking to me.”
That might have had to do with some of Page’s other writings. In a 2004 piece announcing Slatkin’s plans to step down from the National Symphony, Page took issue with the conductor’s penchant for gimmicky programming, such as performing Beethoven symphonies using bombastic Mahler arrangements.
“Some people might call that a gimmick, but I program that kind of music out of curiosity,” says Slatkin.
Page also criticized Slatkin’s apparent habit of reengaging his old friends and Juilliard cronies year after year, artists such as pianist Jeffrey Siegel, the piano team of Katia and Marielle Labèque, and of course Linda Hohenfeld. Slatkin, for his part, categorically denies all charges of favoritism.
“I never, ever hired anyone because they were a friend, and that includes my wife,” Slatkin says with earnestness. Every single artist I engaged was absolutely qualified. But I have great loyalty to artists who have worked well with me in the past. So of course I invited them back.”
Slatkin faced other problems at this time. While serving as conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, some flirtatious emails he sent to the deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie were leaked to the British press. Eventually, that story made its way to The Washington Post gossip column, causing the conductor considerable embarrassment.
“I had some major personal problems and it definitely affected my playing for a while,” Slatkin says matter-of-factly. “But I got through it.”
For all the trouble and disappointment, Slatkin can still claim some triumphs from his time in Washington. “The orchestra plays markedly better than it did before I arrived,” says Slatkin. “I also changed the repertoire, making it more modern and American, and we added more education events. And of course we played dozens and dozens of premieres.”
So what went wrong? Slatkin has an extended analysis.
“One problem is I wasn’t Rostropovich. He was a larger-than-life figure, he could march the orchestra through Europe in triumph, but I’m more of a practical guy and couldn’t get the orchestra the same kind of attention. Also, a lot of people were not happy with my efforts to make the National Symphony more national, with my putting an emphasis on American music.
“I’m something of a loose cannon, I say what I want, and that doesn’t go over well with some people. We also did a lot of festivals with lots of music and limited time to rehearse, but the point of those events was to have an adventure, not to get note-perfect performances. It was also unusually difficult working in Washington, because I not only had to deal with the National Symphony board of directors but also the Kennedy Center board of directors, and sometimes those two groups had interests that clashed.”
There may be one other issue, says Philip Kennicott. “For me the big question isn’t what happened to Slatkin but what happened to that entire generation of American conductors? Maybe it’s because of the decline of the classical record industry, or maybe it’s been the shortage of important posts, but with the exception of [San Francisco Symphony Music Director] Michael Tilson Thomas, the conductors of Slatkin’s generation—Andrew Litton, Hugh Wolff and I think even Marin Alsop—have all failed to achieve a comfortable mature period.”
That gives Nashville a chance to showcase Slatkin’s virtuosic orchestra-building gifts at their underdog finest. Slatkin was originally invited to Nashville because the orchestra, in the wake of Kenneth Schermerhorn’s untimely death, needed a big name to conduct the gala opening of the new concert hall. He agreed to that engagement, and also volunteered to lead the orchestra in a new recording of music by Joan Tower, an old friend.
“He came down to conduct the Tower, heard the orchestra, saw our new concert hall, and said, ‘My God, you people have no idea what you have down here,’ ” says NSO President Alan Valentine. “It was then my idea to try and talk him into being our music advisor. After a lot of work, he accepted.”
Slatkin has many interests: he often says that if he weren’t a conductor he’d be a chef. But right now, his primary concern seems to be figuring out his post-National Symphony future.
“I’ve just been appointed principal guest conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony, and I’m going to be teaching some at Indiana University,” Slatkin says. “I’d like to write a book about the business of conducting. And of course there’s here in Nashville. I don’t know, if it should come up, whether I’d actually want to be music director here. The truth is, we haven’t worked together enough yet for me to really know. For now, I see it as my job to make this orchestra realize how good it can be.”
For the moment, it seems hard to believe that Slatkin would seriously consider a permanent post in Nashville—if for no other reason than that he was earning about $1 million a year more in Washington than the Nashville Symphony could reasonably afford to pay a new music director.
“I’m not sure a man like Slatkin would be willing to take another music director job, since he seems more intent now to settle down to activities like teaching,” says orchestra guru Drew McManus. “But Nashville certainly needs an orchestra builder. And it might give Slatkin a chance to prove himself again. In the very least, he would be a big and entertaining draw.”
Regardless of what Slatkin decides to do, he’s still guaranteeing Nashville plenty of entertainment. Standing outside the Renaissance Nashville Hotel the day after his Mussorgsky concert, Slatkin spots a familiar face. He exchanges a few pleasantries, then timidly asks the question that’s really on his mind.
“That Mussorgsky,” he says, hesitantly, “it was maybe a little bit bombastic, don’t you think?” The listener reassures him it was great fun. At that, Leonard Slatkin gives a mischievous grin.
“Well,” he confides, “there’s going to be a lot more like that in Nashville’s future.”Click here for more photos of Slatkin through the years.
