Leonard Slatkin, From Two Directions

One: That's certainly going to be one candidate to watch. But there are others.

Two: Michael Tilson Thomas?

One: Dream on. Would you voluntarily leave San Francisco?

Two: Fair enough. We'll watch and wait -- and use this opportunity to return to Slatkin. What happens to him now?

One: He's going to be a busy man -- teaching at Indiana University, advising the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, serving as the principal conductor of the Royal Philharmonic in England. Detroit may be a great fit for him -- let's not forget that his most important work to date was building the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra into a truly dazzling orchestra back in the 1980s. Perhaps he can summon the energy and concentration to do the same thing for yet another such ensemble in yet another battered but unbowed Midwestern city.

Two: You don't sound especially hopeful.

One: If he's learned the right lessons from his Washington experience, I'm somewhat hopeful. Fifteen years ago, Slatkin was on everybody's short list to take over one of the great world orchestras -- New York, perhaps, or Chicago. That's all gone; he was never a serious candidate in their recent searches. What a crushing disappointment it must have been for him to learn that he was dismissed from the NSO -- and, let's face it, that's exactly what happened in 2004, for all the polite talk, although the orchestra generously allowed him one final two-year contract.

Two: Life does tend to beat up on us the longer we stick around.

One: Look, he's a gifted and experienced musician and very, very bright. Indeed, I sometimes think that his brightness works against him -- you can get by on that when you are 40, but it starts to seem awfully glib once you pass the half-century mark. Slatkin is 63 years old now -- relatively young for a conductor -- and if he settles in, focuses, studies, opens his ears, allows no performance to go out into the world until it is as polished as he can make it within whatever time restraints he has, he may well surprise us again. That line from F. Scott Fitzgerald -- that there are no second acts in American lives -- is simply rubbish, however ruefully and elegantly phrased. There are third, fourth and even fifth acts -- maybe more, but if five acts were good enough for Shakespeare, I think we might make an end there.