Slatkin and the NSO, Putting It All Together

Those listeners who want a reminder of what Leonard Slatkin and the National Symphony Orchestra can do together at their best should find their way to the Kennedy Center within the next two days to catch their current program, which is smart, provocative and deeply musical.

The late William Schuman was the musical politician par excellence -- he ran the Juilliard School for many years before becoming the first president of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. There can be no doubt that his enormous power and influence inspired many performances of his own works, which have been heard markedly less often since the composer's death in 1992.

That said, there is much to admire in "Prayer in Time of War," which Schuman wrote in the months directly following Pearl Harbor. Here, he takes the long melodic lines and clarified chromatic harmonies that are associated with Aaron Copland's more populist works and adds a certain wiry tenseness that is his own. The long rattles for percussion sound somewhat dated and fustian today -- indeed, rather like the soundtrack for an old World War II movie that we might stumble upon while channel-surfing -- but the softer passages are eloquent and admirably economical in their scoring and their expression.

The poet and composer Philip Heseltine once compared a Ralph Vaughan Williams symphony to a cow looking over a gate. It was very beautiful, he said -- "and so what?" It's a great line, to be sure, but, like so many glib putdowns, it isn't remotely fair. The Symphony No. 6 in E Minor, written in 1947 when Vaughan Williams was 75 years old, has none of the ready-made pastoral nostalgia generally associated with this composer. Instead, it is a bleak, ominous and elliptical creation that some scholars have suggested may be a personal response to the destruction of the Second World War.

Slatkin loves and understands Vaughan Williams and he led an exciting performance. The second movement, with its insistent reiteration of a doom-laden three-note motif, sounded crushingly apocalyptic, while the hushed finale's whispery little fugal melodies came across as something Paul Hindemith might have written had he been more metaphysically inclined. I was especially happy with the lustrous, baying tones from the solo saxophone and the English horn: Alas, many in the audience coughed through much of the last movement last night.

The second half of the program was devoted entirely to the Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat by Johannes Brahms. Emanuel Ax was the soloist and brought his usual merits to the performance -- solidity, musicianship, a powerful and proclamatory technique that he is quite willing to soften and sweeten for intimate passages. Slatkin and Ax have been working together for several decades now and respond to each other reflexively, and first cellist David Hardy's rapt performance of the seraphic solo music that begins the third movement reminded one again of the remarkable talents within this orchestra.

The concert will be repeated tonight and tomorrow night at 8. It's good to know that Slatkin and the NSO can still pull together a performance of this quality.