Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, and principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from next October, comes from a distinguished musical family. His parents were members of one of the 20th century's legendary chamber ensembles, the Hollywood String Quartet. Felix Slatkin was their leader, Eleanor Aller their cellist.
Slatkin senior did all sorts of other things, too, including conducting. "He did a number of recordings with the Hollywood Bowl, and concerts. He headed up a couple of orchestras, smaller ones, in Los Angeles. He did a lot of conducting for people like Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra, and others. Towards the end of his life he'd moved over and become an arranger and conductor for a series of pop recordings for a label called Liberty Records. So he was doing a lot of work in that field, lots."
In musical families, there's often an unstated acceptance, an inevitability even, that the children will follow their parents into the music profession. In his case, says Leonard Slatkin, "That would be an understatement. Although, it could be argued that both my brother and I could comfortably have gone into some other area of the entertainment industry, because my parents were active as musicians, in virtually all phases of music, be it the so-called classical or the popular end, be it films, or string quartets, whatever."
But there wasn't any forcing. "We were simply surrounded with it the whole time. But for a brief time, I left music and was studying English with the idea perhaps of being a teacher. And I also flirted with being a baseball commentator". After all, he says, laughing, "it's part of the entertainment industry."
Conducting wasn't initially a first option. "I began life as a violinist, when I was very young, switched over to piano, then composition, and none of them seemed particularly satisfying to me - or at least I didn't think I would be able to do them very well. Then, when I was 19, my father died. And I know it seems cruel and harsh, but I probably would not have begun conducting if my father were still alive. We were a very competitive household in that respect. So, although I always harboured a desire to conduct, I knew I wouldn't do it as long as my dad was still active as a conductor. He passed away, and an avenue that I never thought would open up, opened up."
When Slatkin gets into full flight about what it is that makes a conductor, the frustration he must have felt with the violin and piano become plain. "I think you have to have a real desire to communicate to a large group of people, be it through gestures, words, whatever. Communication is mostly what conducting is about. It's not about technique.
"I don't think it's necessary to be dictatorial any more, like it seemed to be in the first half of the 20th century. I think it's possible to be more collaborative, if you have the right ensemble, the right working circumstance. It's a little bit similar to the job of, say, a football coach, who has to drill the team, all the practice sessions, and then uses the actual day of the match the way a conductor should, I think, use a performance - and that's to work on the fundamentals that you've tried during the course of rehearsals, but be prepared to improvise and let spontaneity have a great deal to do with all this as well.
"Of all of the parts of music, conducting is the one that almost can't be taught - almost. Talent is something that does come with birth. You either have talent or you don't. Conducting is a little different to the other areas of music, in that most of your work is done without your instrument. It's spent all by yourself, whether in a small room, or with a piano, however you choose to study. And you get to put those elements into practice only when you see the orchestra.
"You can't know exactly how something's going to come out until you actually face the orchestra. So you can have all these ideas about how you think a piece of music should go, and then you're confronted with the ensemble, which may have a whole other set of ideas about how it goes. You have to be a diplomat. You have to be a psychologist. You have to be a father. You have to be a lot of things to an orchestra as a conductor.
"And then, there's the matter of conveying to the whole ensemble what everybody else is doing. I think a lot of people don't realise that the orchestra players only see their part."
He's amused to speculate on how some of the dictatorial figures of the past might fare today. Orchestras have changed. Employment practices have changed. The balance of power has shifted. "So, the relationship is quite different from what it used to be. But if you're strong, leading an ensemble, you're the music director of one, you try to shape the personality and the way the ensemble thinks together, plays together. That's your job. You have to find a way within your own psychological makeup to relate to the players in a way that encourages growth and doesn't build antagonism, otherwise you're not going to get around them. And you wonder what would happen if a Toscanini or Reiner was around today. It probably wouldn't fly. It wouldn't happen."
Slatkin is best known as an advocate of American and British music, the latter connection coming about through his parents and the higher profile of British music in the US in the 1950s, through conductors like Barbirolli, Mitropoulos and Stokowski. He points to the fact that the Hollywood Quartet launched their recording career with the Walton Quartet, though he doesn't mention the album of Delius that his father recorded, a remnant, perhaps, of the competitiveness of his youth. And, at the end of the day. English music was simply something he found himself drawn to.
On the other hand, he denies that the contemporary music he has performed has been all of a conservative cast. If you look back through his past programmes, he says, you'll find Boulez and Stockhausen there, too, though not to the same extent as the more conservative end. His own view is that he does different things in different places. He's often asked to conduct Bruckner in Germany. In France he's known as a French specialist, conducting music by composers such as Roger-Ducasse, Caplet, Ropartz, Florent Schmitt. "As a music director, in the States at any rate, you must have the widest possible repertoire. You're usually the cultural arbiter of taste in any given community."
A question about what Slatkin sees as the major music of the last 10 or 15 years brings a general view of the future, rather than a list of specifics from the past. "I think after the explosion of rap and heavy metal, things have settled down now, to the point where we begin to see parts of the popular culture which have more lasting value. One wouldn't have said that at the beginning of the 1990s, but now you can begin to see that. I think of certain trends, more than the composers or pieces have emerged. What I saw beginning the last 10 or 15 years was the use of music of different cultures, usually coming from those who had emigrated to other countries.
"For example, for years in the States we've thought of ourselves as being dominated by Austro-Germanic repertoire. And the composers who came to work in the states were primarily from those backgrounds. Recently, we've seen Latino-American composers emerging, Asian-American composers. These are people who are now second- or third-generation Americans, in some cases, looking back at their heritage.
"As far as stylistic things go, I think we will see a more eclectic mix of musics and certainly we'll see people finding different ways to present the music itself. I imagine if you had to point to one simple device which has changed a whole world, it's the use of subtitles for opera. Audiences who would not have dreamed of setting foot in an opera house for fear of having no idea what was going on feel more comfortable because they know what's happening."
Even before the announcement of his BBCSO appointment, Slatkin had devised and presented a 10-part series on Discovering Music for BBC Radio 3, and this has also been broadcast on Lyric FM. He's now looking forward to the challenge of seeing what might be done on TV, where the imaginative presentation of classical music has largely proved an intractable problem. A whole new communicative medium is beckoning. Watch this space!
Leonard Slatkin conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra, of which he is principal guest conductor, at the National Concert Hall on Monday in Sibelius's Symphony No 7, excerpts from Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn and Ravel's Scheherazade (with mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade), and Debussy's La mer.
