Appointment of Slatkin augurs well for Lyon orchestra

Classical music writer

Saturday 6 October 2012

I have been mightily taken with a new recording of Berlioz's wonderfully original, ground-breaking and influential Symphonie Fantastique, in a richly sumptuous Naxos recording by the Orchestre National de Lyon, conducted by its new music director, Leonard Slatkin, and reviewed in last weekend's Sunday Herald.

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Michael Tumelty

Slatkin's appointment to the Lyon orchestra is an enthralling one. The band has forged its reputation and sealed its quality with the calibre of work it secured under its former music director Jun Markl, who has moved on to another orchestra. That work, crucially, included a monumental CD series on Naxos featuring, in seven volumes, pretty much every note written by Claude Debussy, including every imaginable orchestral transcription and arrangement.

Markl's Lyon legacy, a richly textured orchestral ensemble, has been seized on by Slatkin, who has layered on to the Lyon sound his own thoughtful and vastly experienced sense of colour, structure, pacing, sonority and momentum. The results, in their first recording, of Berlioz's nutty masterpiece, suggest great things to come. And the news that they will follow through next month with Volume One in a survey of Ravel's orchestral music is a mouth-watering prospect.Slatkin is not everyone's cup of tea: a musician once described him to me as "a safe pair of hands", which I think was intended as an insult. He's been around the block, holding posts with many US and UK orchestras. He had 17 years as music director of the St Louis Symphony Orchestra. He was appointed music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, Washington, in 1996. He's been principal guest conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Hollywood Bowl. In the UK he has held posts with the Philharmonia and the BBC Symphony Orchestras. He is an all-rounder and a rounded character.I met Slatkin once: in a tent, in a field. It wasn't a formal interview. I was in the States profiling the Cleveland Orchestra; Slatkin, at that time (the early nineties) was music director of the Cleveland Orchestra's summer Blossom Festival at Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.He was relaxing in the tent that doubled as a green room when I invaded his space. He was avuncular and unfazed by the noisy, nosey Scotsman who tramped over his pre-concert tranquility in the gorgeous setting of the fragrantly titled Blossom, later that night thrown into upheaval by a thunderstorm, and chatted openly about his famous pedigree.Slatkin came from a musical family. His mum and dad, violinist Felix and cellist Eleanor, worked in Hollywood studio orchestras (in the days when there properly was such a species). In 1939 they were founder members of the Hollywood String Quartet, which became incredibly famous. Their recording of Schoenberg's great, late-Romantic masterpiece, Transfigured Night, recorded with two additional guest players, is the best I have ever heard. Leonard's father was also a concertmaster and conductor who worked for Frank Sinatra. I will never forget Slatkin telling me of the turnover of artists of all persuasions that passed through the house, either for social or musical reasons. That list included Sinatra, Arnold Schoenberg, Jascha Heifitz, Art Tatum and anyone you care to name in the film industry. He was, he said, a bit limited and trapped by that pedigree, on top of which there was fierce competitiveness in the extremely musical Slatkin household.He described the effect of that pressure clearly in a recent interview for Naxos: "I started playing the violin when I was three. Around the age of eight I gave it up because I realised I would never be as good as my father." He took up piano, but gave it up too, "because I realised I could never be as good as my uncle". He persisted, took up the viola, then conducting at Juilliard. He was playing viola in the youth orchestra at Juilliard one day when the conductor was called away to the phone. He looked down at young Slatkin, said: "You want to conduct? OK. Conduct." And that was it.

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Appointment of Slatkin augurs well for Lyon orchestra

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