A Conductor Comes to A Coda

"I think Leonard did a really, really wonderful job building the orchestra," says Michael Kaiser, president of the Kennedy Center. "We owe him a debt of gratitude, also for bringing different repertory to the orchestra and helping our audience understand works."

But the juggernaut seemed to lose steam. Slatkin and the NSO failed to make the mark on the American landscape that Slatkin and St. Louis had done, and, particularly in the standard European repertory, the idea began to spread that Slatkin was phoning it in.

"There was a period when I can easily say I wasn't doing a very good job," he says, apparently referring to the early years of the new century. He was not alone in this estimation.

In the New York Times, Bernard Holland said of a 2004 NSO performance of Beethoven's Ninth that "the playing itself was nondescript, competent, perhaps a little tired." A year later, Washington Times critic T.L. Ponick mentioned "one veteran concertgoer who confided that she never would attend another NSO concert as long as Mr. Slatkin remained at the helm."

Slatkin, 63, has, of course, had to address the perception that his time in Washington did not appear to go well: Within the space of a few years, he went from being a whiz kid to not even being seriously considered for recent vacant music directorships around the country: Philadelphia, Dallas, Pittsburgh, New York, Chicago. (His move from the National Symphony Orchestra, where he makes $1.2 million according to the company's last tax statement, to Detroit, where he will probably make less, is not a clear career advancement, although it's a far better step than he was expected to take as little as a year ago.)

His story line: midlife crisis. "Many personal issues were getting in the way of music," he explains, obliquely referring to episodes such as the relationship with the percussionist Evelyn Glennie that produced an explicitly flirtatious sequence of e-mails, some of which made it into the press after they were found by her husband. (Slatkin's own third marriage, to the soprano Linda Hohenfeld, is also coming to an end.)

With the orchestra, "I just couldn't communicate," he says. "In a couple of cases, there might have been a piece or two when I was not as prepared as I usually am, and the orchestra could see that in two seconds. But I overextended myself; it was silly. I was doing so much, and not giving myself the time to digest it." As he tells it, this bad period lasted about two years but still colors his relationship with the orchestra.

To an objective listener coming in at the end of his tenure, his performances with the NSO have certainly given the impression that something is not quite working. The first nights of programs are audibly under-rehearsed, though it is a shame that it is only the first nights that get reviewed; if one chances to return for a repeat performance of the same program (as I did for David Del Tredici's "Final Alice" in May), one may find that things have improved dramatically within a couple of days.

Beyond that, he generally gives the impression of fluency rather than profundity, and the orchestra sometimes seems not to care. He is effective in his signature American pieces because he is best at activity and complexity: Del Tredici, Christopher Rouse. But he is not someone you turn to for profound meditation. His modus operandi is to do a lot, quickly.

Take the festivals he did with the NSO. "When we did these festivals, we were doing two to three programs a week," he says. "It wasn't about accuracy or anything like that, it was about trying to get a subject across." In other words, quantity and variety take precedence over musical quality.

He cites some of the eclectic repertory from the 2002 festival "Journey to America," which focused on immigrant composers: Dohnanyi's "American Rhapsody," Dvorak's "American Flag." "You're never going to hear these pieces again," he says, "and probably you shouldn't, but it was a chance to showcase repertoire like that." (The Post's then-critic, Tim Page, basically agreed, saying that the "program looked far more interesting on paper than it proved in the execution.")

This is Slatkin's strength, or weakness: He excels on paper. He is great at coming up with unusual ideas, talking to the audience, sitting in on planning meetings and looking at Web sites in Detroit, glad-handing patrons at fundraisers in St. Louis. In fact, he is outstanding at all the parts of the music director's job that aren't about making music. (He is currently writing a book on exactly this topic.)