Slatkin Gets His Rich Desert

NSO Gives Its Music Director a Fine Send-Off in Farewell Concert

Four years in the making, since the announcement in 2004 that Leonard Slatkin's contract as music director of the National Symphony Orchestra would not be renewed beyond this season, the conductor's farewell gala concert took place at the Kennedy Center last night.

In many ways it was a substantial send-off. The program was not high on intellectual stimulation, perhaps, but it was an evening of meaty playing nonetheless, with six big pieces and an encore representing various parts of Slatkin's, and the orchestra's, history. Meaty? More like rich cream: There was a lot of heavy, sweet music, from Bloch's "Schelomo" to Respighi's "Pines of Rome."

Farewell events are freighted with expectation. They are supposed to give a sense of closure. But by the time they arrive, everyone is already mentally on to the next thing: for the orchestra, its summer concerts, next season, and the ongoing search for Slatkin's successor (Eschenbach? another European?); for Slatkin, his next music directorship at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

Even the programming seemed to be over before the evening was done. Nearly every piece had special significance. Shostakovich's "Festive" Overture, loud and messy and cheerful and full of brass, was a Rostropovich calling card; Elgar's Serenade for Strings allowed Slatkin to show off his considerable chops in British music (he was music director of the BBC Symphony for four years, and is currently the principal guest conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London).

Bloch's "Schelomo," for cello and orchestra, was given its world premiere in 1917 by the soloist Hans Kindler, who later became a conductor and founded the NSO; last night it featured the star cellist Yo-Yo Ma, with whom Slatkin has long wanted to perform it. Bernstein's "Candide" Overture obviously plays to Slatkin's signature strengths -- it is energetic and American. (Bernstein conducted it with the NSO in 1977.) Then came a "Dialogue" for two cellos and orchestra written by Slatkin himself, for his mother and brother, not performed since its world premiere in St. Louis in 1975. The two cellists here were Ma and Sol Gabetta, who made her NSO debut in Slatkin's final subscription program earlier this week, and if the music was fairly routine, the performance felt like an emotional highlight.

Then, after all of this significant programming, Respighi's "Pines of Rome" was stuck on at the end, as if someone had simply stopped thinking and said, "What the hell, let's end with a crowd-pleaser." Slatkin has, of course, done the piece before with the NSO. But it seemed to have little resonance beyond the strong, if slightly generic, performance of the orchestra and the huge sounds of the "Pines of the Appian Way" section, which raised the decibel level perhaps higher than any other concert this calendar year.

The orchestra rose to the occasion, playing with considerable focus; the "Candide" Overture, last heard in an underrehearsed family concert in May, now had all of the crispness and verve required. "Schelomo," like "Pines of Rome" a kind of Technicolor tone poem, was the evening's centerpiece, not least because of the contribution of Ma. It was an education in cello playing to hear him and Gabetta side by side in Slatkin's piece: Gabetta's tone was rich and lovely; Ma's, brighter and clearer, had a wider range of timbre. More to the point, every note was vivid and communicative; Gabetta made a lot of pretty sound, but was less precisely articulate.

On the whole, it was a perfectly fine farewell, and less frothy than such things can become. One striking omission, given Slatkin's carefully tended reputation for championing contemporary American composers and his 74 commissions for the NSO, was the lack of any contemporary American piece on the program other than his own. At the end of the evening, after taking up the microphone to thank the audience for "12 glorious years" and their many "wonderful, and sometimes not so wonderful, letters," and an acknowledgment that his taste in composers was not shared by every listener, he offered a bonbon from Leroy Anderson, who, he noted, would have been 100 yesterday. Anderson is Slatkin's latest subject of rehabilitation; Naxos is about to release the third in a five-CD cycle of that composer's very popular, very light, slightly-better-than-they-sound works. But Slatkin is recording them with the BBC Symphony, not the NSO.

After the intermission, a short video paid tribute to Slatkin's tenure, with the familiar slogans about his putting the "national" in National Symphony Orchestra with all of his American programming. He made it America's orchestra, the voice-over averred. The biggest problem with Slatkin's tenure is that for whatever reason, America failed to notice.