SLATKIN OFFERS CLINIC ON SMART PROGRAMS, STUNNING PLAYING Carnegie Hall, New York: October 30, 2002 When it comes to interesting and intelligent programming, no other conductor active today outclasses Leonard Slatkin. Among his fairly recent predecessors, only Erich Leinsdorf showed similar care combined with adventurousness in planning his concerts. Also like Leinsdorf, Slatkin’s very catholicity of taste has somewhat unfairly led to charges of interpretive blandness. The fact is that Slatkin operates at a very high level of technical excellence, and it will always be a matter of personal choice whether or not one prefers to hear, say, a Günter Wand figure who plays the same dozen works over and over again for decades but can give incandescent performances of them, or someone like Slatkin whose omnivorous tastes operate over a much broader range. Mind you, this is not a “quality” vs. “quantity” sort of tradeoff. Slatkin can be as incandescent as any major artist; the problem is that his detractors will automatically discount a superlative performance of a work they don’t care about or don’t know, whereas if you keep playing the same Beethoven or Bruckner symphony very well ad infinitum, then eventually you will (deservedly or not) probably earn credit as a “specialist” of unusual insight. It just so happens that Slatkin offered several performances this evening that fell into the “incandescent” class, most notably Colin McPhee’s proto-minimalist Balinese masterpiece Tabuh-Tabuhan, and the concluding number on the program, Ravel’s La Valse. This last featured supernatural clarity of texture at leisurely tempos in its initial stages, and then took off like a shot and culminated in an absolutely explosive frenzy, exactly what the piece demands but so seldom gets. However, I would like to take the excellence of the performances and the often superlative playing of the National Symphony Orchestra (of a very exhausting musical lineup) as a given, and consider the issue of programming alone, because aside from the quality of each individual rendition, when a conductor goes through the trouble to concoct a program as intelligent and musically rewarding on so many different levels as this one was, then the selection of works itself becomes a major factor in the evening’s success independent of all other considerations. Here, then, is what Slatkin offered: Weber (orch. Berlioz): Invitation to the Dance McPhee: Tabuh-Tabuhan Copland: Dance Symphony McTee: Symphony No. 1 “Ballet for Orchestra” Ravel: La Valse You can approach this program from a multitude of difference angles. First, it’s obvious that the overriding concept is that of the dance. No big deal there, and “concept” programs are all the rage these days, but how many include such a wide range of repertoire and styles, from Weber’s early 19th century German Romanticism as seen by the French Romantic orchestral genius Berlioz, to Balinese gamelan, to the New York premiere of an American orchestral work composed just this year? Or take just one type of dance, the waltz, which opened and closed the concert, which also features prominently in Copland’s and McTee’s symphonies, and so provided an audible unifying thread running through the whole evening (as opposed to an inaudible, non-musical, purely abstract unity, which is an abhorrent if lamentably common basis for concert programming today). Then there’s the fact that the third movement of McTee’s rhythmically vibrant and immensely entertaining work (save for an overlong slow movement) consists of a grotesquely humorous amplification of the first few minutes of Ravel’s La Valse. And let’s not forget that despite McPhee's Canadian origins and visits to Bali, the Orientalism espoused in Tabuh-Tabuhan has its best known Western manifestations in the modern French school of Debussy and Ravel (think of Ravel’s own Mother Goose ballet, with its very similar gamelan sounds). Finally, look at the variety of music offered in terms of its popularity and relationship to normal concert fair. Everyone knows about the Weber, but how often does it actually get played, and in this particular arrangement? McPhee’s piece is a “cult” classic that deserves far more attention than it has received to date. Copland of course remains “the” American composer, but how often can you go to hear a performance of this particular work outside of “Copland Festivals” and such? The McTee, of course, is brand new, while the Ravel is a warhorse, plain and simple, but one that appeared in a whole new light when placed at the end of this particular program, as a sort of summation of everything that had come before. Slatkin’s repertoire choices created unity out of this diversity, making each succeeding work the necessary outcome of its predecessor, and so the entire concert became very much more than the sum of its parts. Such happenings are very rare, too rare these days, by they are part and parcel of Slatkin’s art, and failure to consider this aspect alongside the details of the individual performances themselves is to discount much of what he has to offer, and to ignore what makes him practically unique in the world of music today. David Hurwitz