A Leading Question For the NSO
Speculation Plentiful As to Slatkin Successor

By Tim Page
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 16, 2006

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.

And so I hope that the "new broom sweeps clean" philosophy will not apply in the choice of a successor, that the NSO will not follow a common protocol and give us the "anti-Slatkin." For example, Marin Alsop was appointed music director in Baltimore at least in part because she was everything her predecessor Yuri Temirkanov was not -- highly articulate, accessible to her community, deeply interested in contemporary and American music and, as the first woman to serve as music director of a major orchestra, a figure of no small historical importance. (In fairness, it remains to be seen whether she will be able to give us those never-to-be-forgotten evenings of transcendent musicmaking that marked the Temirkanov era at its best.)

Hegel to the contrary, thesis and antithesis don't always resolve into an idealized synthesis. Back in 1970, the New York Philharmonic decided to follow the flashy, balletic, hyper-romantic Bernstein with the coolly intellectual modernist Pierre Boulez, who proved an unpopular choice and was replaced by the glamorous but sloppy and effusive Zubin Mehta, who was himself succeeded by the steady, somber craftsman Kurt Masur, who gave way to the willful uber-virtuoso Maazel. Is there a pattern here? Or only decades of swerving from one direction to another?

I hope that the NSO builds on many of Slatkin's ideas, improving on them rather than repudiating them out of hand. Washington needs to hear contemporary music -- we just want smarter examples than most of the pieces Slatkin chose to advance. Thematic programming is fine, but gimmicks such as Mahler's bloated arrangements of Beethoven hardly qualify. And an informal welcome from conductor to audience is one thing; laissez-faire expediency preparing the musicians is quite another.

And so the question remains -- who will get the nod? Stephane Deneve's appearances with the NSO have been unfailingly colorful and exciting; moreover, he has proved a persuasive advocate for a truly wonderful composer, Guillaume Connesson (who, along with Pascal Dusapin, may be turning Paris into an important musical capital for the first time in decades). Deneve, a Frenchman who is music director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, has intellect, nuance and temperament, but he is young for the job, and from a very different culture. Still, the gifts are there.

For a decade or more, James Conlon, now music director of the Los Angeles Opera and the Ravinia Festival in suburban Chicago, has been discussed for any number of soon-to-be-vacant positions. Still -- whether by his choice or otherwise -- he has yet to take a major American orchestra. His rendition of the Mahler Third with the Juilliard Symphony at the Kennedy Center last year was far more sweeping, searching and illuminated than the one presented by the NSO -- with what was ostensibly a "student" orchestra, no less. If Conlon currently seems to be stuck in that curious limbo of "everybody's second favorite," it should not be forgotten that those are often just the candidates who, when the votes are counted, take home the prize.

Ivan Fischer, co-founder and artistic director of the Budapest Festival Orchestra, has been appointed principal guest conductor of the NSO, but it is unclear what this means, other than that he will lead a few performances each year. He is a sensitive and seasoned artist, with a firm hand. Osmo Vanska has led some terrific concerts with the NSO, several of them with virtually no rehearsal time (in the ill-fated "Festival of Favorites" some years back), but he is said to be happy in his position as music director of the Minnesota Orchestra. And there are a number of gifted conductors around who have long histories with the NSO -- Hugh Wolff, an American based in Germany, and the Spanish conductor Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos among them -- but who don't seem to be on the radar for this appointment, at least not yet.

It is still early in the game, after all. Nobody really knows who will be elected president in 2008; I don't think the prospects for music director of the NSO are much clearer.

And what happens to Leonard Slatkin? He has made it obvious in several recent interviews that he has his eye on replacing Barenboim in Chicago. In a story that appeared in the Chicago Tribune last week, he went so far as to set out the "terms" under which he would accept the job. And he threw some darts at the Kennedy Center and its president, Michael Kaiser.

"This administration wants to move to a more secure and traditional base," he said. "That's not what I do." Slatkin also suggested that the Kennedy Center is pushing for "a more populist-oriented music director" to improve ticket sales.

I doubt it. I expect a serious, painstaking search and the eventual appointment of a serious, painstaking music director. And, in fact, Slatkin's programming for the NSO's 2006-07 schedule is tame and populist in the extreme, studded with the same soloists he has relied upon throughout his tenure here -- violinists Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman, flutist James Galway, pianist Andre Watts, and the duo-piano team of Katia and Marielle Labeque (the last two playing their third NSO performance of Saint-Saens's "Carnival of the Animals" within the past decade).

In an e-mail interview last week, Slatkin said he had "made adjustments" to his programming for the 2006-07 and 2007-08 seasons to reflect the wishes of the NSO and the Kennedy Center, which, he said, are "interested in a more centrist musical policy with less interest in new and American music."

But does any such policy exist at the Kennedy Center -- especially when its other offerings in dance, theater and music are compared to what they were five or 10 years ago? It certainly doesn't seem that way.

After the Tribune interview appeared, Kaiser released a statement that read, in its entirety: "I have always appreciated the innovative programming Leonard Slatkin has brought to the National Symphony Orchestra and have been pleased that the Kennedy Center could increase its investment in NSO programming over the past five years. The NSO's new Music Director, no doubt, will bring his or her own perspective to programming, but I would expect any new Music Director to bring both challenging new works and standard repertory to our audience."

The challenge stands. The NSO is now a very good orchestra, thanks in no small part to Leonard Slatkin. But who will make it a great one?