A Conductor Comes to A Coda
NSO's Leonard Slatkin Leaves on a Note of Regret

By Anne Midgette
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 29, 2008

Leonard Slatkin is temperamentally nervous. When he takes the stage to conduct, he walks out rapidly, slightly hunched, his head thrust forward, as if moving through a gantlet and trying to protect himself from the needling arrows of thousands of watching eyes. In person, in his office at the Kennedy Center, he sits back in a pose of assumed relaxation, his soft Muppet face marked with thick white eyebrows and a sharp line of a mouth, and chats.

But he skitters across topics, anticipating the criticism that may be lurking behind every question, mentioning it, steering away from it, then returning to it to show that he is not steering away from it, until one is left with the impression that outside criticism, despite his protests to the contrary, matters to him very much indeed.

The general impression is that conducting is a difficult metier for a man who describes himself as having been chronically shy in his youth. The particular impression, as Slatkin talks about his 12-year tenure at the head of the National Symphony Orchestra (which concludes with a gala concert tonight), is of encountering someone in the final throes of a failing marriage, going over ground that has been trodden many times before, prodding the scars of old wounds that still have a tired ache.

"It was probably time to go," he says.

"I know inside of me," he adds, "that I could have been better."

So what happened?

Slatkin the conversationalist is like Slatkin the conductor: You get a lot of material, flecked with flashes of apparent revelation that recede as quickly as they appear. Talking about one subject, his firefly mind is already on to the next one.

These days, that next subject is usually the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, where he becomes music director in the fall, and which he speaks of in the star-struck tones of a new lover. Detroit is wonderful. In Detroit, he will have a finger in every pie: reimagining the orchestra's youth programs, revamping its Web site.

"We're reaching a whole element," he says of his vague but ambitious plans to extend arts education in his new position. "Things I wished I could have done here, and I probably could have but I didn't do a good enough job at it."

He is certainly not shying away from self-castigation.

The story of Slatkin and the NSO has been oft-told in the media, here and in the other cities where he is establishing artistic footholds: Detroit; Nashville, where he became music adviser to the Nashville Symphony in 2006; London, where he led the BBC Symphony Orchestra for four less-than-halcyon years and is now principal guest conductor with the venerable, though B-list, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; Pittsburgh, where he is about to start a stint as principal guest conductor.

In a nutshell: A superstar who elevated the St. Louis Symphony into what Time magazine called one of the 10 best orchestras in America, noted for his easy populist touch and conversational tone with audiences, Slatkin came to Washington in the footsteps of Mstislav Rostropovich and improved discipline, appointed new players and put the "national" back in National Symphony with dozens of contemporary and 20th-century American works.

"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.)

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.