A Conductor Comes to A Coda

The things that make top European conductors shy away from American music directorships -- the fundraising and community activities that have been cited as a reason Daniel Barenboim left Chicago, or that seemed difficult for Mariss Jansons in Pittsburgh and Yuri Temirkanov in Baltimore -- are just the things he likes.

And one problem Slatkin had in Washington is that these are not things he is called on to do at the NSO. The orchestra, supported by the Kennedy Center, does not have to worry about its funding, or revamp its own Web site. This would seem to make it a plum assignment for someone eager to focus on the music. But Slatkin feels his hands were tied.

"It's what I'm good at," he says of fundraising. "And I wanted to be more involved in it. But I couldn't. . . . I think the whole time I was here I was never out on any fundraising call whatsoever." Plenty of conductors grouse about having to raise money; Slatkin may be the only one to complain about not getting to do enough.

Detroit, a sound orchestra in a city that needs a revitalizing presence, may be a better fit than Washington for Slatkin's aspirations to be a kind of cultural mayor. Indeed, the NSO may emerge as a lacuna in a splashy, entertainment-focused career.

It is a funny twist of circumstance that Slatkin, a prolific recording artist, happened to be at the NSO exactly during the fallow period in the industry when hardly any American orchestras were recording. In the past few years, recordings have helped rehabilitate the conductor's reputation. His 2005 CD of William Bolcom's "Songs of Innocence and Experience" led to two Grammys for Slatkin and an ongoing relationship with the Naxos label; he won two more Grammys this year for Joan Tower's "Made in America" on the same label with the Nashville Symphony. But the recorded legacy of his NSO years extends to only a handful of releases. (He will record "Final Alice" -- but with Nashville.)

He leaves behind him an orchestra of raw potential that needs more focus, whose players are audibly eager for the European repertory and approach that Ivan Fischer, the principal conductor for the next two years, will bring them. "I do know they [the NSO] are playing quite well," says Gideon Toeplitz, the former managing director of the Pittsburgh Symphony. "He's not leaving an orchestra in a shambles."

One imagines Slatkin departing from Washington with his signature walk, head down, shoulders hunched, leaving American music in the hands of Marin Alsop at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Alsop shares Slatkin's taste in composers and, like him, defends her not always top-flight conducting behind an unimpeachable barricade of contemporary, accessible, American works.

"It's interesting over there," he says of Baltimore, where he will conduct for the first time next season (he was contractually barred from appearing there while at the NSO). While Alsop is in Baltimore, he says, "in a way I still feel like I'm here. While she's over there I'm not concerned about American music."

And after all, he is in this field only to please himself. "I never really think about" reviews, he says, "because ultimately I know when I've done okay and when I've not."

Funny thing, though: He seems to remember a reviewer's every mistake. He is still citing what he claims were errors in a Washington Post review of 2001.

Criticism doesn't matter? Maybe not. But you come away with the impression that, whatever you think of his music, it is impossible, from Leonard Slatkin's point of view, to love him enough.