A Leading Question For the NSO

Speculation Plentiful As to Slatkin Successor

Who will get the nod in 2008?

Again and again, the subject comes up -- at work and after hours, in the midst of formal dinner parties and over beers at a Dupont Circle bar. Dispassionate experts handicap the field; fierce partisans make the case for one candidate or another, while the rest of us watch, wait, ponder and ask ourselves:

Who will be the next music director of the National Symphony Orchestra?

Leonard Slatkin, who has fulfilled those duties with the NSO since 1996, still has two years to go on his contract -- and, no doubt, some fine concerts to conduct. Still, so far as shaping the direction of this particular orchestra is concerned, Slatkin is history. Over. Lame duck. As the customer in the Monty Python pet shop might have put it it -- he is an ex- music director, stapled to his perch.

Despite the warmth and personal decency of most of the people who run it and play in it, the NSO has always been a tough orchestra to lead and not a single one of its five music directors -- Hans Kindler, Howard Mitchell, Antal Dorati and Mstislav Rostropovich preceded Slatkin -- has left under entirely happy circumstances. Poor Dorati, probably the most gifted conductor of them all, was told that he was being replaced only a few minutes before he was due to walk out onto the Kennedy Center stage to conduct Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring."

By comparison, Slatkin was treated kindly. In November 2004, when informed that his own tenure with the orchestra was rapidly approaching the end of its natural life, one last two-year contract was salvaged from the bargain -- which, considering that Slatkin is paid more than $1 million a year, was hardly a negligible concession on the part of the NSO.

One million dollars a year! All this for some 20 weeks of work, and augmented by the prestige of directing the leading orchestra in the capital of the United States. It should be one of the most coveted positions in classical music, not least because the NSO is directly affiliated with the Kennedy Center and need not concern itself with many of the financial pressures that are affecting other groups throughout the country. (The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, for example, recently withdrew nearly a third of its endowment to wipe out a $16 million operating deficit and stabilize its finances, and even once-mighty Cleveland ran a deficit of almost $6 million last year.)

But there are other, even more prestigious, orchestras in search of music directors right now -- notably Chicago, where Daniel Barenboim will take his leave this June, with no clear successor in the wings. By 2008, there may be vacancies in Philadelphia and St. Louis. And in 2009, when his contract expires, Lorin Maazel will be almost 80 years old and might just decide that he is tired of conducting the New York Philharmonic. And then there is the question of the Boston Symphony Orchestra's James Levine, who has suffered from ill health for years and who recently took an unexplained tumble leaving the stage in Boston that damaged his shoulder and has suspended his conducting career for the foreseeable future.

And so the question becomes not only "Whom do we want?" but "Whom can we get?" And I have no definite answer to the latter question except that, for better or for worse, Washington probably can't get David Robertson, who is much loved in St. Louis (where he is music director through 2008 and where they hope he will stay) but is also said to be on the shortlist for both Chicago and New York. Moreover, Robertson recently took over for the indisposed Levine on a national tour, conducting a tremendously difficult program brilliantly and on short notice, so Boston is clearly aware of his gifts, too. He is undoubtedly the conductor of the hour, but that hour probably will not elapse in Washington.

For the record, I don't think Washington can get Simon Rattle, Riccardo Muti or Michael Tilson Thomas, either. Washingtonians might as well wish for Leonard Bernstein or Arturo Toscanini.

The one legendary name bruited about by orchestra members is that of Christoph von Dohnanyi, who conducted the NSO for the first time in February and made a spectacular impression. But Dohnanyi is already 76 and, after an 18-year tenure with the Cleveland Orchestra, which ended in 2002, he is unlikely to want to take another permanent position. Still, the NSO musicians are so taken with Dohnanyi that some have suggested he be offered what is known in orchestra circles as "the Muti option" -- a fantastically lucrative sort of mini-contract such as the New York Philharmonic was on the verge of setting up with the Italian conductor some years back, with several million dollars changing hands for five or six weeks of work.

Much as I admire Dohnanyi, this is a bad idea. The NSO needs a real music director, a gifted and dedicated person who will give full attention to the orchestra at a pivotal moment in its history and build upon Slatkin's accomplishments. After all, on a purely technical level, Slatkin did much to improve the quality of the playing; section for section, this is a much better orchestra than it was in 1995.