His vivid curiosity is unmistakable in the variety of projects planned for this milestone birthday year. These range from publishing a pair of books and spending more time on his own composition to launching a new partnership as artistic consultant to the Las Vegas Philharmonic. Appearances on the podium are naturally also on the calendar. This autumn brings reunions with the three American orchestras indelibly shaped by Slatkin’s years at their helm (in St Louis, Washington DC and Detroit); some international conducting engagements beckon as well.

‘It feels almost like being a student again,’ Slatkin says from his home in the Midwestern city of St Louis, where this Los Angeles native’s rise to international prominence began all those years ago. He’s referring to his work on a pair of detailed study guides for conductors that are appearing this year: each volume addresses how to make the scores of eight orchestral masterpieces from the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively, come to life in performance. ‘I’ve had to go through the things that I tried to learn when I was young once again. But now I’m relearning them with the experience that I gained after all these years. It’s been absolutely fascinating to have this discovery take place on a different level.’

When he does look back, Slatkin prefers to think of how the experiences of his storied career can relate to today’s musical scene – so it’s entirely characteristic that his latest recording project, undertaken in June ahead of its live world premiere later that month, combines a tribute to the Hollywood milieu in which he came of age with newly commissioned compositions. ‘Pictures at an Exhibition: The Paintings of Bob Peak’ is a suite of new music by 10 major contemporary film composers (among them Jeff Beal and Marco Beltrami), each of whom was asked to contribute a movement responding to a different image by Bob Peak, the pioneer of the modern film poster.

To record these new ‘Pictures’, Slatkin returned to the historic Newman Scoring Stage in Los Angeles where his father, Felix Slatkin, played as concertmaster of the 20th Century Fox orchestra from the late 1930s until the early 1950s; young Leonard would often tag along. ‘It’s the one sound stage that they didn’t touch in terms of the acoustics,’ Slatkin points out. ‘Everybody wants to record there.’ A third generation is now adding to the family’s Hollywood legacy: son Daniel Slatkin (b1994) has been establishing himself as a composer for film and television over the last few years. ‘I anticipate that he’ll be doing a lot of his film work there as well, so it really is a kind of coming full circle’ – an especially resonant statement for Slatkin to make in this special birthday year.

Finding a forum in St Louis

Slatkin’s parents were both powerful figures in the Hollywood music industry. While Felix Slatkin was performing as concertmaster on countless soundtracks for 20th Century Fox (and later conducting at the Hollywood Bowl), the Warner Brothers cellist Eleanor Aller, his wife, became the first woman to be appointed a principal in a Hollywood studio orchestra. Together, they founded the Hollywood String Quartet and – anticipating what their son would achieve as a major recording artist – earned international recognition through a now-legendary discography.

The Slatkins, 1950s: father Felix and mother Eleanor with Leonard (left) and Frederick

But the constant musical stimulation was accompanied by a competitive atmosphere. ‘I started playing the violin when I was three but realised pretty early on that I would not be as good as my father, so I stopped,’ Slatkin recalls. Because his brother, Frederick Zlotkin, followed the matrilineal path of the cello, that instrument was out – as was the piano, the domain of his uncle Victor Aller.

The loss of the music education programmes that abounded in American state-funded schools of his youth is a recurrent cause for lament for Slatkin. Thanks to the lively musical offerings at his Los Angeles secondary school, he got to do a bit of conducting to introduce the arrangements of musicals he made for student productions. At 16, before he was of legal age, he got an under-the-table job at a bar playing jazz piano, further expanding his range of experience. Still, it took the shock of his father’s sudden death from a heart attack to nudge young Slatkin, only 18 at the time, along his professional path towards becoming a conductor. As a composer, he would come to terms with the trauma of his father’s premature passing much later in his touching elegy to his parents, Kinah (2015).

Apart from what he learnt from his father, who was increasingly drawn to conducting in his last years, Slatkin trained under two key mentors: Walter Susskind at the Aspen Music Festival and School, and Jean Morel at the Juilliard School. ‘Between the two of them, it was a good balance: technical skills in how to read scores from Morel, and practical ones from Susskind,’ Slatkin says. Morel in particular ‘somehow had the gift of being able to convey what the technique of conducting entailed – something that is really difficult to teach. He was also old school and tough – I never got a compliment in four years with him.’

When Susskind was named music director of the St Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) in 1968, he invited Slatkin to come along as his assistant. The only obstacle was military conscription as the Vietnam War continued to escalate. Slatkin recalls: ‘Sure enough, I got called up, but I flunked my physical.’ Susskind and St Louis together provided the ideal environment for a curious, thoughtful and ambitious young conductor to develop his artistic identity. ‘I never had an end goal in terms of what kind of orchestra I wanted to lead,’ says Slatkin when he recalls his motivations at this turning point in his early career. ‘I just knew that I wanted to be an active promoter of the American repertoire, both old and new.’ His long tenure at SLSO, where he stayed to lead the ensemble as music director from 1979 to 1996, gave him a robust forum to pursue that goal through recorded and live performances alike.

Breakthrough with Gershwin

Susskind emphasised the importance of establishing a presence through recordings. A Czech émigré who had fled the Nazis and became a loyal British citizen, Susskind himself had built an extraordinary reputation through some 200 releases with the newly formed Philharmonia Orchestra prior to his tenure in St Louis. ‘Up until the 1950s, St Louis had been very big in the recording market, but then disappeared from it,’ according to Slatkin. Susskind secured an agreement with Vox Records, among the earliest of the budget labels, and then gave his assistant Slatkin his first major break by stepping aside to let him take on SLSO’s inaugural project for the label: a three-LP box-set of Gershwin’s complete works for orchestra. It’s a gesture Slatkin has echoed through his own acts of generosity on behalf of musical colleagues. ‘Of course, Susskind could have done it,’ Slatkin says, ‘but he thought I would be better for the project.’ Featuring Jeffrey Siegel as the solo pianist and released in 1974, Slatkin’s recording debut also proved to be the first integral Gershwin orchestral cycle. ‘It put St Louis back on to the market and has never gone out of print,’ he adds.

Young Slatkin with his beloved SLSO, an orchestra with which he first became associated in 1968 and which was indelibly shaped by his years at its helm, from 1979 to 1996 

After acquiring the Vox catalogue, Naxos remastered and reissued several of these earliest items from Slatkin’s discography. In a post from 2023 on his blog at leonardslatkin.com (among the most enjoyable, informative and clear-headed in the classical blogosphere) where he favourably compares those early Gershwin efforts with later ones, Slatkin says: ‘The balance of old-world style and charm never seemed overdone, and indeed, I still believe that one needs to have the image of Fred Astaire, and possibly Oscar Levant, firmly in mind when performing these works.’

The American Sound Initiative

Thus began a prolific career on record that encompasses more than a hundred albums attesting to the extraordinarily wide range of Slatkin’s interests. ‘It really was a kind of golden age. I was making five or six records a year. The deals with the labels were good – quite the opposite of where we are now.’ His parallel projects with the Philharmonia and other British orchestras would expand that rate of productivity on disc still further.

Few currently active conductors have developed such a natural affinity with the recording studio. The independent producer Andrew Keener, who collaborated on his UK recordings of the Elgar and Vaughan Williams symphonies, tells me that Slatkin always stood out as ‘a conductor who is totally studio wise, and who knew how to apportion time in the studio. He always approached British music with no preconceptions but with a freshness and originality that speaks to newcomers and to British musicians who have lived with this music all their lives.’

Slatkin’s cultivation of American repertoire in particular reflects the widely ranging tastes encouraged by the environment in which he grew up. Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Frank Sinatra were familiar faces at the Los Angeles home his parents made into a centre of eclectic music-making. The Gershwin set became the entry point for his lauded interpretations of early and mid-20th‑century composers who sought to establish an American counterpart to European tradition: ‘the era of the great American symphony’, as he describes it – another corner of which his peer Gerard Schwarz was at the same time exploring with the Seattle Symphony.

Aaron Copland with Leonard Slatkin (right) in 1970

Slatkin homes in on particular favourites from his own accounts of what he ‘might call the standard American repertoire’: Hanson’s Second Symphony; Barber’s First coupled with the Piano Concerto (with soloist John Browning), as well as his Vanessa – a later project with the BBC SO on Chandos and one of Slatkin’s relatively few opera recordings; and Copland’s Third Symphony, which he has elsewhere described (in connection with his second recording of the work, made in 2015 with the Detroit SO) as ‘probably the single finest statement by an American writing in the symphonic form’.

Memories of the circumstances associated with making each of these recordings remain strikingly vivid for Slatkin. Yet he is all too aware that the majority of this vintage of American composition has fallen into oblivion – despite the efforts of younger, like-minded conductors such as Marin Alsop (whose debut recording was of music by Barber). He points to Copland’s Third as an example: ‘You’ll only rarely see it on a European orchestra programme, and we still don’t even play it enough in this country – even though we should be playing it as often as we play Beethoven’s Fifth.’

‘It was wonderful to see Marin and a few others get involved. But it’s a bit bizarre that nowadays most conductors who are coming from abroad to lead American orchestras haven’t embraced any of the older mid-century repertoire. That means that we’re not going to hear the generation after them, either – Jacob Druckman, Donald Erb and so many others. That’s really unfortunate. It’s like coming to Leipzig as a music director and saying you’re not going to play any Mendelssohn. If I was a young conductor starting out, I would use part of the season to at least occasionally look back.’ Although Slatkin has no desire to return to a music directorship position, this neglect has motivated him to consider ways to reverse it through various educational projects he dubs the American Sound Initiative.

Unusual fare

The eagerness to expand repertoire boundaries that has become a priority for the generation of conductors establishing themselves today was foreshadowed by Slatkin during his glory years with the SLSO – which Time magazine’s music critic Michael Walsh singled out as the second-best orchestra in the country in 1983. Slatkin explains: ‘I became absolutely enthralled with all the other American composers, along with the classic ones, who were emerging in the ’60s and trying to find their voices. Since part of my background was as a jazz musician, I could really tune in to how elements of the popular culture influenced symphonic writing as well.’

This enthusiasm meshed neatly with the strategy Slatkin and his colleagues devised, in parallel to recordings, to bring SLSO to broader attention. ‘We’d go on tour doing stuff that nobody else was doing. Our concerts in New York became an event. People flocked to them.’ He cites as an example William Bolcom’s vast song-cycle Songs of Innocence and of Experience, ‘an extravaganza’ that drew throngs of curious listeners to Carnegie Hall in 1992. The work later launched Slatkin’s fruitful relationship with Naxos, his 2004 recording with musical forces from the University of Michigan garnering two of his six Grammys.

As additional examples, he mentions Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s Worldes Blis – ‘the hardest piece of music I ever had to conduct in my life’ – and the American premiere (in 1994) of Nicholas Maw’s 1987 work Odyssey, which (at least until then) was touted as the single longest continuous orchestral score. Slatkin’s passion for the music of English composers – encompassing the classic repertoire of Elgar and Vaughan Williams as well as works by these more contemporary voices – has long paralleled his devotion to American music. In an unusual intersection of the Anglo-American spheres, Slatkin marked the 2008 centenary of Leroy Anderson by recording his complete orchestral works with the BBC Concert Orchestra. ‘I’m especially proud of this project. It’s what we used to refer to as “light music”, but I think of Anderson as a master of the miniature in the manner of Johann Strauss.’

A good mixture

Behind Slatkin’s track record of premiering new orchestral music (more than 220 compositions) lie many stories of lasting relationships forged with different generations of composers, from Joan Tower to Mason Bates. ‘Leonard changed my life,’ Tower tells me. ‘He took a big risk by inviting me to become composer-in-residence in St Louis after I’d written only one and a half pieces for orchestra. He really took a stand for living composers.’

Tower’s rise to prominence in turn led to one of Slatkin’s greatest triumphs on disc when he collaborated with the Nashville Symphony for the all-Tower album ‘Made in America’ (a threefold Grammy winner in 2008). ‘Nowadays, we’re realising that we have to move ahead beyond the museum of Dead White European Males,’ says Tower. ‘But Leonard was already doing that on his own.’

He’s not about to retire at 80, but Slatkin is letting the younger generation decide on the direction of things in terms of repertoire (photography: Cindy McTee)

When the late David Del Tredici, for example, cast aside serialism and created his Lewis Carroll-inspired epic Final Alice, Slatkin regarded it as a watershed and declared his passionate support. The work’s premiere in Chicago in 1976 was, for Slatkin, nothing less than an epiphany. It signalled that composers were henceforth able ‘to freely write what they wish,’ he wrote in his debut book, Conducting Business (2012). ‘That one night in October’, he continued, ‘was the catalyst that gave permission and changed the contemporary musical landscape in America.’ Slatkin led the first uncut performance of Final Alice in St Louis in 1977, and to celebrate the SLSO’s centenary in 1980, he commissioned another Alice in Wonderland-related project from Del Tredici: the Pulitzer Prize-winning In Memory of a Summer Day for solo soprano and orchestra.

‘Whether it was older composers or newer ones we were performing, I think it was a good mixture. I’m very proud of it all,’ says Slatkin. ‘But nowadays I’m not so interested in making recordings unless it’s something unusual, like Alexander Kastalsky’s Requiem for Fallen Brothers’ – a long-forgotten monument to those lost in the First World War composed during that war by a student of Tchaikovsky. The esteemed American producer Blanton Alspaugh, a frequent collaborator with Slatkin during his tenure with the Detroit SO, persuaded him to take on the project (recorded for Naxos in 2018).

While Slatkin’s interest in recording music has diminished, he hopes that ‘maybe people will refer to some of the discs I made. I think I was pretty good at representing the music of this country at that time, at least on record. But we are now in an extremely transitional time. I’m leaving it to the younger generation to figure out what’s important.’

This article originally appeared in the August 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue of the world's leading classical music magazine – subscribe to Gramophone today