Washington's National Symphony Orchestra isn't yet among NorthAmerica's top five - but it's nipping at their heels, writes ArmintaWallace
On the phone, Leonard Slatkin, the music director of the Washington Symphony Orchestra sounds as American as apple pie. He even jokes that if he hadn't been a conductor, he'd like to have been a baseball commentator - and in fact, during his previous day job at the St Louis Symphony, he often helped out at his local radio station when the St Louis Cardinals were on the pitch. Washington doesn't have a baseball team: but he's working on it. And given the energy and commitment with which Slatkin has hauled the city's National Symphony Orchestra away from mid-range blandness and into a position where it's nipping at the heels of the "Big Five" bands on the north American continent, (traditionally the New York Phil, Philadelphia and Cleveland, and the Boston and Chicago Symphonies) well, don't bet on DC being short on home runs for much longer.
Dig a little deeper than the pleasantly-modulated voice and gentle humour, though, and you find another of those astonishing immigration stories which America does so well - and which this country might profitably sit down and study. Slatkin grand-père arrived at Ellis Island from Odessa in 1904, only to meet an immigration officer who spoke no Russian. "It's typical of what happened to so many people when they came to these shores," Slatkin says. "Somehow they managed to get the idea across that 'we need your name'; the man would write something down; and that's what they became. Whenever we asked about it, my grandfather would only say 'We had no life before we came to America. Our name is Slatkin.' And that was it."
It wasn't enough for Slatkin's younger brother, Frederick, principal cellist with the New York City Ballet - he reckons he's really a Zlotkin, and has adapted his spelling accordingly. "And my mother's name," adds Slatkin, "was Altschuler; one half of the family shortened it to Aller, the other half stayed Altschulers. So we have relatives on my mother's side with two last names . . ."
A typical immigration story? Perhaps. But the Altschulers, Allers, Zlotkins and Slatkins have made a contribution to the American musical scene which is way beyond ordinary. Leonard Slatkin's father, Felix, was a violinist, conductor and arranger; his mother, Eleanor Aller, was a cellist who, in a long career, recorded soundtracks which ranged from the luscious music played to Bette Davis in the film Deception - later rewritten by composer Erich Korngold as his Cello Concerto - to the large-scale backdrops of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
By day, the Slatkins played in the Hollywood studio orchestras; at night they made up half of the highly-regarded Hollywood String Quartet. His grandfather's brother founded and conducted the Russian Symphony Orchestra of New York; his maternal grandfather played cello in a vaudeville pit on Broadway; and his uncle Victor was the staff pianist at Warner Brothers, the man who did the glissando at the end of the Looney Tunes cartoon show.
Did growing up in such a musical household make it unlikely - to put it mildly - that young Leonard would embark on a career as a baseball commentator? "Well, there was a year and a half where I did leave music altogether, studied comparative literature and was thinking of becoming, of all things, an English teacher," he says, with a chuckle which suggests he's very glad he didn't.
"But as for my family background, it's hard to know, because the school system in California was also very strong on arts education. Now, as in many parts of the world, that has faded away or disappeared. So it's hard to say. I certainly think having heard a high level of professional music-making from an early age made a big difference to me. On the other hand, I don't think it's absolutely necessary. If a young person shows talent and ability, that's what's important."
Talent or no, when the youthful Slatkin stood in front of a professional orchestra for the first time he was, he says, terrified. "There were times when I'd stand up and I didn't know what to say. So I thought, 'Well, I'll say nothing and it'll be all right.' And here were orchestras looking for guidance from the podium! But, you know, you start out working with students and people who are your colleagues, and maybe an amateur orchestra. And finally you stand up in front of musicians who have played the music you're about to conduct many more times than you've conducted it." It was partly to bridge this scary chasm that the Kennedy Center founded its National Conducting Institute which, every year, teaches budding young maestros.
"It's not about just saying, 'OK, this bar is in two,' and 'Here's how fast it's gonna go,' and stuff like that," he says. "It's really about where to play in the bow, and what kind of sticks the timpanists will use, and where the trumpets need to take a breath, and what kind of mute stand is best. There are a lot of things to consider as a conductor, and most of it is about taking time - unlike violinists or pianists, conductors don't have the luxury of an instrument at our disposal to practice with. So you need much more study time than most of the music profession."
Along with this insistence on attention to detail, Slatkin has been noted, during six seasons as music director of Washington's NSO, for imaginative programming. Last September, he gave three performances of an overture Beethoven never wrote; the piece, based on ideas the composer jotted down for an opera based on Shakespeare's Macbeth, had been posted on an Internet site (www.unheardbeethoven.org). "Well, it wasn't a great work," he says. "But I think it's better to imagine what might have been, than to not know at all." Earlier this year, a festival at the Kennedy Center featured, among works by an impressive variety of composers from Schoenberg to Kurt Weill, Bright Sheng to Paquito D'Rivera, 39 performances of The Star-Spangled Banner in arrangements by composers from outside the US.
The latter included Stravinsky, who added one or two of his trademark dissonances to the anthem - only to be confronted, after conducting a performance in Boston in 1944, by cops who impounded his score and charged him with violating a state law which prohibited "tampering with national property".
This time around, his efforts were received with considerably more enthusiasm. "It was a grand exercise for us," says Slatkin. "We had two or three of the anthems at each concert, and the audience really got into it - and seven or eight hundred would even stick around for panel discussions afterwards. We had scholars from the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, and we . . . well, let's just say we know far too much about our own anthem now," he concludes.
When the NSO goes on tour overseas, Slatkin insists that the programme at each venue should include at least one American work.
On its forthcoming series of European gigs, these will be Roberto Sierra's Fandangos, Gunther Schuller's Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee, Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms and Serenade, and John Corigliano's The Mannheim Rocket. Some venues, such as Vienna and Ljubljana, opted to take four of the five; Dublin will hear just one, the Corigliano.
Is this a case of horses for courses? "Each venue has to balance it into their seasons, and they have their patrons, who they have to sell the concert to," says Slatkin. "I know we offered some more extreme works - something a little more advanced and adventurous - but most of the places just didn't want anything like that."
Corigliano's piece takes its title from the nickname given to an 18th-century orchestra in Mannheim, reputedly the first in Europe to be able to make a crescendo while speeding up at the same time. "He has taken various quotes from Austro-Germanic music - it would be unfair to give them away because the fun is in hearing them, but they reach from Mozart through Wagner to Schoenberg - and gradually speeds them up, getsthem louder. And then, as if it was a real rocket, it rises through space and crashes through some imaginary barrier that's containing all of us in the universe; so then we're in space for a little while, floating around. And then the rocket has to come down, so all the quotations are taken and reversed. It's a good, strong, eleven to twelve-minute concert opener with some unusual instruments, including a musical saw and a bunch of broken glass," is Slatkin's description of the work.
It will be paired with Dvorak's New World Symphony, which is not so new at all - "No? I thought it was a première out there" - but which we don't often hear played by American orchestras. Joking aside, Slatkin is adamant that the NSO doesn't play it in an "American" manner. "I don't think it's a composer who's writing in an American style," he says.
"I think it's like somebody writing a postcard home, saying; 'This is where I'm visiting, and this is what it's about, but I miss everybody at home.' I would hope that people will hear a nice European blend of strings and winds, not the overwhelming brass sonority, a sound often associated with American orchestras."
Bridging the two will be Rachmaninov's Variations on a Theme of Paganini, with Mikhail Pletnev as soloist. "There are very few pieces I consider perfect, to the point where you couldn't change a bar or a note or this or that - and this is one of them," says Slatkin. "For all its popularity, it's the subtlety of the work that makes it so astonishing; the craftsmanship, the interplay of the piano and the orchestra. It's really more like a symphony for the orchestra with piano in it."
With his wide experience of audiences both in the US and in the UK, where he is chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the 56-year-old Slatkin is unconcerned about the so-called "greying" of the audience at symphony concerts.
"If you look at photographs or videos of audiences in the past, you'll see the audience is about the same as it always was," he says. "Most people here don't start coming to concerts on a regular basis until they're in their forties or so. They have children who are grown-up enough, their careers are more established, they have more leisure time, they can pick and choose what they want to do. So, I really don't think the audience is getting older at all." The conductors do seem to be getting younger, though?
"Well, they are," he laughs. "Because I'm getting older."