Leonard Slatkin’s adopted city of St. Louis will celebrate his 80th birthday twice in the coming months.
Slatkin going octogenarian is the hook for the Chamber Music Society of St. Louis’ fundraising gala on September 9. Pianist Olga Kern, a Slatkin favorite, will perform a solo set, some duets with Cho-Liang Lin on violin, and the Scherzo from Brahms’ Piano Quintet in f minor with a quintet of St. Louis Symphony Orchestra players. Ozzie Smith from the maestro’s baseball team of choice will offer remarks and a birthday present.
Then Slatkin, conductor laureate of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, curated an SLSO program on October 25 and 27 themed around his birthday. “I wanted to have it as a family affair,” Slatkin said in an interview with The St. Louis American.
It opens with “Timepiece” (2000) by Cindy McTee, Slatkin’s wife. (The time she was keeping was not birthdays but rather the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s 100th anniversary.) Then SLSO will take up Slatkin’s own transcriptions of “Five Sonatas for Orchestral Wind Ensemble” by Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757). The first half of the program closes with the U.S. premiere of “Voyager 130” by Daniel Slatkin, the maestro’s St. Louis-born son.
The American spoke at length with Leonard Slatkin about his intergenerational musical wealth, his evolving literary career from unpublishable science fictionist to award-winning author, his moving back to his adopted home of St. Louis, his recipes for salmon and onion on the grill, Ray Bradbury, Frank Sinatra, and chamber music.
St. Louis American: You’re throwing yourself open to Chamber Music Society of St. Louis for this birthday celebration. Why the dedication to this particular organization?
Leonard Slatkin: I grew up in a house that was multifaceted in terms of their musical lives. Part of it was devoted to being members of the Hollywood studios and the orchestras there. Another part was in the popular music industry, particularly Capitol Records. The other part was the Hollywood String Quartet. So I grew up virtually every night listening to my parents’ quartet rehearse from the earliest possible times.
Chamber music became to me the kind of music where composers seem to reach down deeper into themselves. Chamber music brings musicians together. Everybody is required to know what everybody else is doing. It’s not that way with an orchestra. Very rarely, say, do the percussionists know what the strings are doing all the time. But in a quartet or trio, there is this collective knowledge that is so vital to making a complete musician.
St. Louis American: Why have you continued your devotion to St. Louis? When I see you, I think, wow, this guy could be anywhere today, and he’s here.
Leonard Slatkin: About six years ago, I completed my tenure with the Detroit Symphony. I realized that the business part of the orchestra world had changed so radically from when I started that I no longer wanted to do it anymore. I decided it was time to stop and focus on guest conducting, writing books, writing music.
But where would my wife and I reside? My son, who’s a composer for film and television, lives out in L.A. Why not go to L.A., where I started my life? Well, fires, earthquakes, floods, taxes, cost of living, traffic, pollution – no, not for me.
Then I was guest conducting here, and my wife – who really didn’t know St. Louis very well, although we met here back in the nineties – took the car, and while she was driving around she thought, it is actually quite nice here. The next day she went out with a real estate agent, and two months later we identified a property where we could design the interior of the house.
That was one reason – we could shape the physical house for what we had. All the orchestras I worked with had housed my various libraries and my piano. Now, without an orchestra, I had to have a whole space for what was a rather massive library.
I’ve had two major heart surgeries over the last 15 years, and St. Louis is always near the top of the list when it comes to medical facilities. Since I usually came here every year to conduct, I maintained relationships with those doctors.
My son was born here as well. He was the fourth generation of Slatkins to be associated with St. Louis: my grandfather, who came from Russia; my dad, who was born here and was assistant concertmaster of the orchestra; myself, of course; and my son. So there was a nice history.
The other night we had a reunion. Some people there were in this orchestra before I started. It reminded me of the very special time that we all had here during that era, one that really cannot be replicated today. This feeling of family and camaraderie – the stories could have gone on all night.
St. Louis American: I am just discovering your presence as a writer. Your publisher seems to be reading my symphony reviews for The American because they sent me your new book, Eight Symphonic Masterworks of the Twentieth Century: A Study Guide for Conductors.
Leonard Slatkin: I have been writing since high school. I had gotten to know Ray Bradbury, the science fiction author, out in L.A. I was in love with science fiction, so I wrote all these short stories. They were terrible. Bradbury encouraged me to publish, but they were always rejected. Then, as the music career developed, I didn’t have time to write anymore.
But along comes the web. And people said, you have all these stories and all these things you like to talk about. So I started writing close to 15 years ago. As a couple of years progressed, I could feel myself getting better. People said, you really should write a book. So, I wrote the first one, won a couple of awards and it sold well, so the publisher wanted another.
The one you’ve been looking at is the fourth book. I would go through these scores and take them apart, right from the title page. When I talk about the Rites of Spring, I say you learned something just from looking at the title page, where it says, “Pictures of Pagan Russia” – that influences how you think about the piece. So you haven’t even opened to a bar of music, not even the instrumentation page, and already there’s something you need to glean from it before you should conduct it.
Then I send my notes to another conductor. I ask them to go through it to see if I’ve gotten all the rehearsal numbers and bar numbers. What did I say that is wrong? What did I say that has an alternative in terms of instrumentation or interpretive approach? They come back to me, then I go through it again. Then I send it off to my assistant. She goes through it for all the grammar and punctuation and syntax. So, it’s a pretty involved process.
Read the other books, and go back to the online journal, go right back to the beginning, and say, by God, he was a horrible writer when it started.
St. Louis American: What’s next for you?
Leonard Slatkin: In January I premier sort of an original piece. A few years ago I was conducting in Hiroshima, and I was doing Mahler 6. After the concert the administration of the orchestra said they wanted to honor Franz Schubert for whatever anniversary is coming up, and they asked my wife to write the piece. Well, she’s moved away from being a composer. She’s more now into photography.
But I was starting to do more composition again. And I said, Schubert, I’m there. I’d be happy to write it. So, I actually got my first commission. Everything else I’ve ever written has just been because I sat down and wanted to write.
The first volume of the Score Study series that you have is out; the next one will show up in November. Being on a 9-to 10-month timeline means I have to do a lot of work. It takes a lot of study and research to get those done.
So, those are the things that occupy me – and the cooking. This time of year I’m out there on the grill every day I could be there.
St. Louis American: Leonard Slatkin at the grill?
Leonard Slatkin: Look, I’m from L.A. We used to go down to the beach in Santa Monica, where they have these pits. You brought all your stuff, and you cooked outside on the beach. Sinatra came out to the beach with us to just experience real grilling.
St. Louis American: You’ve grilled at the beach with Frank Sinatra?
Leonard Slatkin: Oh, yeah. Sinatra was a close friend to the family, really close. He wouldn’t do anything without my parents playing and in some cases my dad conducting. We called him Uncle Frank. He came to the house often. After dinner he would walk me and my brother upstairs, tuck us in and sing us to sleep. Not too bad.
St. Louis American: What have you been cooking lately?
Leonard Slatkin: It’s mostly on the grill, so there’s been a degree of simplicity to it. I do a really nice pecan-crusted salmon on a cedar plank. I have a lovely thing that I do with an onion where I just take a little wedge out of it from the top. You infuse it with chicken stock, maybe some peach preserves, you wrap it up in foil, and you put it on the grill. It is so delicious. I mean, I’m not bragging. It’s just really good.
St. Louis American: I’m trying to picture this scene. Is there a swimming pool by this grill?
Leonard Slatkin: Oh, no, no, no, no. We’re not here a lot, so we can’t have a few things. One is a yard because we’re not here to take care of it. Two is a pet. Sad. I would really like to have a dog. The third one is a pool. Swimming is the exercise I turn to when I wanna do something. I was on a swim team in high school. A pair of trunks always goes with me on trips, just in case the hotels have a place for me to wave my arms in a different direction.
Chamber Music Society of St. Louis will celebrate the 80th birthday of Leonard Slatkin on September 9 at The Sheldon. Visit chambermusicstl.org. The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra will perform “Slatkin’s Legacy” October 25 and 27 at the Touhill Performing Arts Center. Visit https://shop.slso.org/. 8174/8175. For Leonard Slatkin’s online journal, books and recordings, visit https://www.leonardslatkin.com.