Ravinia 2019, Issue 5, Week 9

AT 75, 40 YEARS ON FROM HIS FIRST AMERICAN MUSIC DIRECTORSHIP, “ I THINK NOW ORCHESTRAS ARE GETTING MORE OUT OF ME ,” SAYS LEONARD SLATKIN. S a conductor and ask students to try to guess what the piece is. “With Bernstein, you would know within two bars what he was doing.” S L A T K I N MA D E H I S R E P U T A T I ON , in part, as an advocate for American music, but the Russian repertoire that composes his Ravinia program on August is also among his specialties. If someone wanted to nd a link between the two traditions, he says, it could be that composers from the two nations “jumped around.” e Austro-German tradition that constitutes the center stream of the Western canon can be traced in a fairly straight line from Bach through the Second Viennese School, he notes. But that can’t be said of the Americans, with in u- ences from all directions, or of the Russians, who “moved from the nationalism of Glinka to the symphonic era of Tchaikovsky, then into the exotic of Rimsky. Rachmanino took a page from the Romantics, avoiding sentiments of countries, both his own and the Eastern in uences. So the early part of the th centu- ry saw a little of everything.” In , Slatkin conducted the American Soviet Youth Orchestra at Ravinia and a few other locations on tour as part of a multiyear e ort between Oberlin College and the Mos- cow Conservatory to forge more literal links between the two traditions. Looking back on it now, “it was a very strange idea,” he says. Musicians from the two countries did not mix socially as much as the organizers had hoped, so “putting two cultures together didn’t produce much of an exchange of ideas.” But one piece on the program, Joseph Schwantner’s New Morning for the World , featured a narrator reciting speeches by Martin Lu- ther King Jr., and Slatkin made sure to have a translator during rehearsals. “I tried not to make it political,” he says, “but there was a subtext.” Whether the ideals succeed or not, conducting young peo- ple—and other educational e orts—has always been important to him. Whenever he’s engaged as a guest conductor, he tries to schedule a rehearsal, or even a performance, with the city’s youth orchestra, and he remains proud that he founded the Saint Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra in —a group that now has , alumni, including six current members of the Saint Louis Symphony. “ ey did Scheherazade recently,” he beams, “which is not an easy piece, and I’m very proud of that.” Slatkin makes a teaching visit to the Manhattan School of Music every year, and he frequently brings his experience to other conservatories as well. Beyond conducting, he tries to impart “the realities of the profession when you get out of school.” Students are taught plenty about Beethoven and Mahler, but much less about conducting a movie soundtrack or putting together a pops concert in one rehearsal, “and that’s what they’ll deal with if they get a job with an orchestra.” Not having commitments as a music director now means that he can spend more time advocating for arts education and thinking about what shape that might take. “My years in LEWEL LI 26 RAVINIA MAGAZINE | JULY 29 – AUGUST 11, 2019