Made to Measure

In bringing Leonard Slatkin on board as its new music director, the DSO found a harmonious fit: a solid conductor who can also drum up support for the orchestra

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In a box at Orchestra Hall, Leonard Slatkin looks over his domain.

Portrait by Marvin Shaouni

At 64, when most people are primed for the kicked-back life of retirement, Leonard Slatkin is poised to plunge into his duties as new music director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra with the glee of a schoolboy on the cusp of summer break.

Conductors are like that; they don’t think of their careers as finite. They don’t retire — not because they have to keep working, but because they must. There’s something so invigorating, so unabashedly joyous, so life-affirming about making music, that a final coda just isn’t an option when they reach 65. Or 75, or beyond. As long as they can lift a baton and wave their arms, conductors will continue to cajole an expressive passage from the woodwinds, coax a feathery pianissimo from the strings, or demand a crashing climax from the brass. Leopold Stokowski, Eugene Ormandy, Bruno Walter, Arturo Toscanini, Antal Dorati, their white manes flying behind them, their postures bent, nevertheless soaked up the elixir of music until they virtually drew their last breaths. Like Dorian Gray in reverse, their bodies aged while their souls remained eternally young.

So it isn’t surprising to find Slatkin, dressed casually in slacks and a cardigan and sipping a Diet Coke, talking animatedly about his plans for the orchestra on a fine September afternoon in a rehearsal room backstage at Orchestra Hall. His eagerness is almost palpable. “If I could start tomorrow, I would,” he says. Thwarting him is his jam-packed schedule, which also prevented him from making his debut as the DSO’s 12th music director at the conventional beginning of the season in September.

Slatkin’s datebook fills up faster than a pretty girl’s prom card. In addition to his duties here, he’s the principal guest conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, music adviser to the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, and principal guest conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, London. When he agreed to take the reins here, his other conducting dates were long since agreed upon, so he’ll make his debut this month on Dec. 11, with Orff’s perennial favorite Carmina Burana, Verdi’s overture to La Forza del Destino, and the world premiere of James Lee III’s A Different Soldier’s Tale on the program. The concert will be repeated Dec. 12-14.

Good Timing

Like the insistent tick-tock of a metronome, timing is paramount in music. And so it is with choosing a music director. After Neeme Järvi left the DSO for the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra at the end of the 2004-05 season, the orchestra needed a leader. To keep things cohesive, the DSO named Peter Oundjian as music adviser in 2006. But filling the music director slot isn’t merely a case of finding whoever’s available, however talented he or she may be. That person also has to click with the musicians and the board of directors.

“First and foremost, we were looking for someone who could inspire the orchestra and the audience at the very highest level,” says Anne Parsons, the DSO’s president and executive director. “The second thing is chemistry. We all know that there are good leaders who can run companies, but they’re not always successful. They can be very good at what they do and still not be a good fit.”

There was a parade of contenders for the post, but no one leaped out. After Slatkin guest-conducted the DSO in the spring of 2007 for the first time in 20 years, the buzz spread throughout the orchestra. Could he be the one?

“When I came then, I wasn’t even looking for a job,” Slatkin recalls. “But I reassessed my life at that point. I thought, this hall is terrific, and Orchestra Hall was a very important factor in my decision, because to an orchestra, the hall is their instrument. And it was clear that the orchestra had tremendous pride and integrity. I don’t know how they maintained their level of musicality and technical expertise without a music director, but they did. So I arranged a second date.”

The wheels quickly started turning with the search committee. If Slatkin was a hit with the orchestra and the board — well, what was holding them back? Plus, in a serendipitous turn, Slatkin’s tenure with the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) in Washington, D.C., would end after the 2007-08 season.

Then, too, there was the name recognition. Anyone remotely acquainted with classical music knew Slatkin’s name, either through his more than 100 recordings or his long stints with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (17 years as music director and several years before that as assistant and associate conductor), and a dozen years with the NSO.

“It really wasn’t the name,” Parsons insists. “It was the experience of having him come and work with the orchestra that spring. It started onstage, and immediately turned into conversations behind the scenes.”

In October 2007, the DSO announced it had hired Slatkin for a three-year contract, followed by a two-year option. Two additional sets of concerts conducted by him in the spring and summer of 2008 merely cemented what DSO Concertmaster Emmanuelle Boisvert felt from the beginning.

“We knew almost instantly that this was the person we wanted as our music director,” she says. “The response the orchestra can give to Slatkin is immediate. With him, we know a bar in advance — from the first reading, without rehearsing — what he wants to achieve. Nothing is left to guessing. I know which dynamic he wants to end up at, what tempo, how the ritard will be, where he’s going with the phrase, where the climax will be, all without having to talk about it.”

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