Leonard Slatkin

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 20:08

The programme was originally broadcast in the year two thousand, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My castaway this week is a conductor. He was born and brought up in Hollywood. The studios and their stars, Danny Kaye, Frank Sinata, and Doris Day among them, were part of his everyday life. His parents were musicians, and he began playing the violin at the age of three. By fifteen, he was playing cocktail piano in an LA bar. He studied at the Juilliard School of Music, and since then he's enjoyed a long career as one of America's most famous conductors. A consistent champion of English music, later this year he takes up the post of conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and in 2001 will become the first foreign maestro to conduct The Last Night of the Proms. I think I'm looked at as the non-British saviour of British music, he says. He is Leonard Slatkin. Why does it need saving, in your view, Leonard? Or what does it need saving from?

Leonard Slatkin1:20

I don't think it needs saving from anything other than the fact that, very much like American music.

Leonard Slatkin1:25

People tend to isolate the music of their own country. The only way that the music gets heard

Leonard Slatkin1:32

In broad fashion, it is for conductors from other nationalities to pick it up. Can you imagine if Beethoven and Brahms were only played by German conductors, or if Debussy and Revelle were only done by French? Well, for the most part, English music seems confined primarily to English conductors and artists, and the same for American music.

Presenter1:50

But not in your case, of course. I mean you spent a lot of time selling it around the world, I think.

Leonard Slatkin1:51

Come on.

Leonard Slatkin1:53

I don't have to sell it too hard because the music is great.

Presenter1:56

Hmm.

Leonard Slatkin1:56

I think one point though is that people seem to be interested that I will have a specific take on the music, that it will seem different because somebody who's not English is doing it.

Presenter2:08

Do you think it does?

Leonard Slatkin2:09

No, I think it sounds very much the same. I think that the music itself is so individual and so unique.

Leonard Slatkin2:15

that it speaks to us in many different ways.

Presenter2:17

But you've said, nevertheless, that there are things you want to change. You've talked about wanting to give the BBCSO a completely new profile. What are you going to do with it?

Leonard Slatkin2:25

Perhaps not completely, because its history is too distinguished and long to dismiss altogether. But I do think that most orchestras today need to broaden their activities and their repertoire so it's not limited to what we would simply call the traditional concert hall music. It means that we have to be comfortable in many, many styles, that the idea of incorporating elements of popular culture into a program comes into play. The way we communicate and present the concerts themselves also should change.

Presenter2:56

What about The Last Night of the Proms though? I want to talk to you about the other kind of things that you might do in your role later on. But The Last Night of the Proms, very jingoistic, gets a lot of flack for that. Do you worry you?

Leonard Slatkin3:08

Does it worry you? No, the ones I've seen, and I've only seen them on television.

Leonard Slatkin3:13

seemed to me to be very moving and very touching.

Leonard Slatkin3:16

And the traditions of the last night are something I wouldn't want to touch.

Presenter3:20

Do we keep land of hope and glory?

Leonard Slatkin3:22

I think we do. I think we keep all of the traditional four ending pieces. Oh, Jerusalem stays in, the Phantasia on the Sea Shanties stays in. Controlling the crowd would seem to be the more intriguing effort.

Presenter3:35

And that's certainly up your street. Let's turn to your choice of records to take to a desert island, because it's very eclectic. Tell me about the first one.

Leonard Slatkin3:43

We're going to listen to Frank Sinatra, who, as you pointed out in the introduction, was a frequent guest in the house and of the family. Now, Sinatra, of course, was the consummate singer, perhaps, of the century. And he was a wonderful man. He was someone that if you were on his good side, you were friends for life. You didn't want to be on his bad side.

Leonard Slatkin4:06

My parents, who worked by day in the Hollywood studios, my father being the leader of the orchestra at 20th Century Fox and my mother being first cellist over at Warner's, would spend their evenings either rehearsing string quartets, which we'll talk about later, but also doing session work in the studios in the popular end. Every time Frank Sinatra needed to have an orchestra, he would call on my parents. My father would serve as his leader, and my mother would be the first cellist. In fact, at one time, there was a session where my father was not feeling very well, and he went up to Frank and said, you know, I just have to go home. I've got the flu or something. And Sinatra called off the session, paid personally, the entire orchestra to go home.

Presenter4:48

Where was Nelson Riddle in all of this?

Leonard Slatkin4:50

Well, Nelson Riddle was

Leonard Slatkin4:52

one of Sinoptra's, and to some people's minds, his very best arranger. But unfortunately Nelson was not the best conductor in the world. And one of the albums where my father goes uncredited as conductor is one of those intimate

Leonard Slatkin5:09

Albums where you listen to it at two three in the morning.

Leonard Slatkin5:13

In the wee small hours of the morning

Leonard Slatkin5:22

While the whole wide world is fast asleep

Leonard Slatkin5:30

Uh

Presenter5:45

Frank Sinatra in the wee small hours of the morning, and you say you could tell your father was conducting that.

Leonard Slatkin5:50

There was a moment where the violins take a little bit of time and they slide down between one and two notes. My father had a specific way of doing it and asking for it. So that's kind of the secret there.

Presenter6:02

But as a boy it was Doris Day who stole it, and the men were in the middle of the city.

Leonard Slatkin6:05

It was. It didn't matter that I knew Danny Kaye and all the various actors and actresses from the studios. Dorsey had a song called Secret Love, which was a big hit in the fifties.

Presenter6:15

Once I had a secret art.

Leonard Slatkin6:16

That's right. And I'm sure she was singing to me.

Presenter6:20

But the music you heard most at home, if I understand things aright, um, was classical music, because your parents were half of the Hollywood the celebrated Hollywood string quartet.

Leonard Slatkin6:30

Exactly. In nineteen forty-seven, I was born in forty-four, the quartet began its life and they would do the studio work in the day.

Leonard Slatkin6:39

and in the evening they would rehearse in the living room of our house. So I could actually sit at the top of the stairs and listen to them rehearse while they thought I was asleep. There were many works that I got to know. In fact, it's not so often that you can say that as a youngster your favorite works were the quartets of Beethoven and Bartok and Schumann, whoever it happened to be. But that was the music that I truly loved when I was little.

Presenter7:02

But but popular music you played as well, obviously in film music and so and was there a distinction made in the house about it?

Leonard Slatkin7:04

Yeah.

Leonard Slatkin7:07

I know that.

Leonard Slatkin7:08

Good music was good music. There was never a category assigned. We never talked about classical music. There were just different musics that sounded different and had different meanings for different people. If it was good it was good. It didn't matter.

Presenter7:22

Tell me about your second record.

Leonard Slatkin7:24

The quartet made

Leonard Slatkin7:27

Many important recordings, most of which have now been reissued.

Leonard Slatkin7:31

But perhaps the most important would have been the one they made in nineteen fifty, which was the first recording of the original version for six players of Schoenberg's Verklertenacht Transfigured Night.

Leonard Slatkin7:44

Capital Records wanted Schoenberg himself to write the liner notes for the album.

Leonard Slatkin7:51

He was a difficult man.

Leonard Slatkin7:53

and he insisted to hear the performance prior

Leonard Slatkin7:57

To submitting anything in writing. So, my parents trekked all the way out to Schoenberg's house in the valley.

Leonard Slatkin8:03

It was a warm summer day hot, not warm.

Leonard Slatkin8:09

And they came in and Schoenberg greeted them dressed in a very heavy black overcoat, all the windows and doors closed, so it was even warmer in the house.

Leonard Slatkin8:19

They sat down and began to play for him and after two or three.

Leonard Slatkin8:23

Measures, Schoenberg stopped them, said, No, no, could you please do such and such?

Leonard Slatkin8:27

They went back and they started again. He stopped them again, asking for something else.

Leonard Slatkin8:32

My father, said Bastro, do you mind, if once we just play it straight through for you?

Leonard Slatkin8:37

And then let's begin to work. But we'd like you to get an idea of what our overall conception of the work is.

Leonard Slatkin8:44

The piece is not quite half hour long.

Leonard Slatkin8:46

And

Leonard Slatkin8:48

There were pools of perspiration on the floor by the time they'd finished the playthrough.

Leonard Slatkin8:52

Schoenberg didn't say a word. He stood up.

Leonard Slatkin8:55

and started to leave.

Leonard Slatkin8:58

My father said,'No, no, master, now we would really like to work and get your ideas'. And Sherbert turned and said,

Leonard Slatkin9:05

No, you are absolutely right to play it through for me. That was absolutely beautiful. I could not have asked for anything.

Leonard Slatkin9:11

More than what you've given to it, you'll have your program note in the morning.

Presenter10:11

The last few moments of Schoenberg's Fecleta Nach transfigured night, and that was recorded in nineteen fifty by the Hollywood String Quartet. Right. And as they formed themselves, you, aged three, took up the violin to emulate your father, I presume.

Leonard Slatkin10:24

Probably, and realizing very soon that I would never be nearly as good as he would be, I quit that and took up the piano. But I had an uncle, Victor Aller, who was uh the staff pianist at Warner Brothers, along with my mother, who was the cellist.

Leonard Slatkin10:39

And I thought that would work, and then I knew I wouldn't be as good as my uncle.

Leonard Slatkin10:43

So then I took up the viola, because nobody in the family played it.

Leonard Slatkin10:46

And that worked alright, and then I realized people kept making fun of me.

Presenter10:50

Do they?

Leonard Slatkin10:50

Yeah, sure. Very old jokes were in already in the fifties and sixties before they were now.

Presenter10:55

So you were intimidated by all this expertise around you.

Leonard Slatkin10:58

I think I was. It was a little bit difficult because the level was so high and the household was competitive.

Presenter11:04

Yes, and that seems to come through in what I've read about this sense of competition. And you've actually gone as far as to say you were what we call now a dysfunctional family. What do you mean by that?

Leonard Slatkin11:14

In the sense that we really

Leonard Slatkin11:16

didn't communicate other than in the world of music and baseball. That were the two things that we could talk about. We didn't see our folks very much because they were working away in the day. Sometimes in the evening we'd have supper together and then the quartet would rehearse. So there really wasn't much going on. Unfortunately, my father was an alcoholic.

Leonard Slatkin11:35

And smoked about three and a half packs of cigarettes a day, was a bit overweight, and died when he was 47. There's a lesson there.

Leonard Slatkin11:42

My brother had probably a harder road than I did because he's a cellist, and there were three generations of cellists in the family prior to him.

Leonard Slatkin11:50

So it was a bit more difficult, I think, for Fred than me.

Presenter11:55

Tell me about your third record.

Leonard Slatkin11:57

The west coast was a haven.

Leonard Slatkin11:59

for refugees, mostly escaping from the war, some coming before. And among the refugees to settle in Los Angeles was the great violinist Joshua.

Leonard Slatkin12:09

who was very much like Schoenberg in the sense that a little bit sour and difficult personality, but he had

Leonard Slatkin12:17

An overriding passion for playing chamber music and inviting people to his home.

Leonard Slatkin12:23

But for these occasions everybody who came was asked

Leonard Slatkin12:28

To bring their own lunch.

Leonard Slatkin12:30

In a paper bag.

Leonard Slatkin12:32

It was specifically laid out, the schedule that would happen. They would rehearse for a while, they would have their lunch, they would rehearse some more, and then if there was time at the end, anybody who could would engage mister Heifitz in ping pong match in his basement. And my dad was good at it.

Leonard Slatkin12:48

But you didn't dare beat Heifitz.

Presenter13:41

Jascha Heifetz playing part of the finale of Prokofiev's violin concerto No. 2 in G minor with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Serge Krusevitsky.

Presenter13:50

You say your father died when he was forty-seven. You'd have been nineteen. Now, for some reason, it meant

Leonard Slatkin13:54

Right.

Presenter13:56

That death that you could become a conductor explained to me.

Leonard Slatkin13:59

In a way.

Leonard Slatkin14:00

The competitive nature of

Leonard Slatkin14:03

the family and the household.

Leonard Slatkin14:05

Now

Leonard Slatkin14:07

was liberated to a certain degree. But for a year and a half I left music altogether.

Leonard Slatkin14:13

and became an English major at City College in Los Angeles with the expectation that I would actually be a teacher.

Presenter14:21

Were you happy about that? You were happy that you were just leaving music behind?

Leonard Slatkin14:24

I was. I thought it had caused enough grief and trouble.

Leonard Slatkin14:28

that although I loved it dearly, that for a while I needed to be away from it.

Presenter14:31

The trouble being the competition it had caused.

Leonard Slatkin14:34

Yes, and perhaps the fact that there was no real family life in the traditional sense not that I knew what that was.

Presenter14:40

So

Presenter14:41

Slowly but surely you realized you had been liberated by his death.

Leonard Slatkin14:45

In a way. And it's sad to say that, but it's an unfortunate fact, I suspect.

Presenter14:47

Hmm.

Presenter14:49

But from then on it was kind of plain sailing. You knew exactly what you wanted to do.

Leonard Slatkin14:53

It was a very clear path. I went to study in the summers at the Aspen School of Music Festival with Walter Susskind. And in the winters I went to the Juilliard School with Jean Morel. And between the two of them we had

Leonard Slatkin15:10

The kind of training that really very few people can get. Morel was a very strict disciplinarian in the French manner. Everything was structured. Solfege was important. Everything about your technique was important. But Susskind was more concerned with the practical nature of conducting. What was it like to deal with the personalities of the orchestra? How did you come to approach a piece of music as a musician, not just as a technician?

Presenter15:36

And he threw you in at the deep end, didn't he?

Leonard Slatkin15:38

When he became music director in Saint Louis.

Leonard Slatkin15:41

He asked me to come as his assistant.

Leonard Slatkin15:44

And one time, early on in his tenure, he was conducting the Sixth Symphony of Vaughan Williams at rehearsal, and he turned round to me. I was in the audience. Assistant's job is basically to be there and hope somebody gets sick so you have a chance to conduct, but that very rarely happens.

Speaker 215:53

Yeah.

Leonard Slatkin16:00

He said, I'd like to go out in the hall and listen to the first two minutes of this. Do you mind? and I said, No. And I got up, began the sixth. About thirty five minutes later, at the end,

Leonard Slatkin16:14

We finished and I turned around and I said, How were the first two minutes? And he said, It was lovely. The rest seemed okay too. And he liked to do that to me. It was a a way of testing. The the job of an assistant is to be

Leonard Slatkin16:25

prepared for anything at any given time, and he was making sure that he was bringing me along properly in that way.

Presenter16:31

To do it to your assistance now.

Leonard Slatkin16:33

Yes.

Presenter16:35

Record number four.

Leonard Slatkin16:37

One of the most

Leonard Slatkin16:39

Astonishing groups to appear.

Leonard Slatkin16:42

On recording.

Leonard Slatkin16:43

were a group of singers called the Singers Unlimited.

Leonard Slatkin16:48

They never appeared live, they couldn't because what they did was specific to recording.

Leonard Slatkin16:54

They would multi track. The four voices would sing, they would pile on another four voices, another four, and another four, creating virtually an orchestra of voice with such pure intonation that you can only

Leonard Slatkin17:08

Dream.

Leonard Slatkin17:09

That this could happen in a concert.

Speaker 317:12

Speaking of the sky.

Presenter17:42

The Singers Unlimited with The Fool on the Hill. So it was Susskind who introduced you Leonard Slatkin to English music, mm-traditional English music, Britain, Walton, Elgar, and so on.

Presenter17:53

and which you as we've said you've taken across the world. But you're an advocate of American music as well. What you like, you said, is is m music with a face. What do you mean when you say that?

Leonard Slatkin18:03

There are so many composers.

Leonard Slatkin18:06

Who wrote

Leonard Slatkin18:07

Good music

Leonard Slatkin18:08

But when you listen to it it's a little hard to tell who they are. They fall in a category of decent composers who have not so much personality in their music.

Leonard Slatkin18:20

I can admire.

Leonard Slatkin18:22

A composer who is recognizable after a few bars, a few measures of music. I may not feel comfortable with the style or the music, but

Leonard Slatkin18:32

I'm interested more that they have a profile, that something about them is individual and unique. I don't have a lot of use for the composers who just fall into general categories and I get criticized.

Speaker 218:46

Yeah.

Speaker 318:46

Well

Leonard Slatkin18:48

Um

Leonard Slatkin18:51

A composer, for instance, who I don't have a lot of sympathy with.

Leonard Slatkin18:56

as a conductor is César Franc, but the music doesn't sound like anybody else, so I have great admiration for it.

Leonard Slatkin19:02

To some degree, and this'll probably be shocking for people.

Leonard Slatkin19:07

I'm not a particularly great Brucknarian, but of course I have the greatest admiration for the scope of the work, because it doesn't sound like anybody else. I'm just not so comfortable with it.

Presenter19:18

No. But who touches you really then? Who really gets you where it

Presenter19:22

really means something.

Leonard Slatkin19:24

Forget

Presenter19:24

Forget the respect, talk about the the gut.

Leonard Slatkin19:25

Yes.

Leonard Slatkin19:26

I find that Bach in particular, of course, for I think most musicians remains the

Leonard Slatkin19:34

The God?

Leonard Slatkin19:36

Ah, but it can be diverse. Mahler can be there.

Leonard Slatkin19:39

Debussy can be there, and Rachmaninoff can be there.

Presenter19:42

Hmm.

Presenter19:44

Which we'll come to. But what about your favorite form? Do you have one? There's no opera on this list, interestingly.

Leonard Slatkin19:49

No, opera for me is a little different.

Leonard Slatkin19:53

Having grown up the way I grew up, with a string quartet in the house, and listening from very earliest age to say the late Beethoven quartets, the six Bartag quartets, the works of Mendelssohn, Dorjak, Mozart, Haydn,

Leonard Slatkin20:08

Nothing that I do in the symphonic work.

Leonard Slatkin20:12

to me equals the sophistication, intimacy, and overall form of communication that the quartet has.

Leonard Slatkin20:25

Now, that being said,

Leonard Slatkin20:28

The reason opera doesn't play so much a part of my life is that

Leonard Slatkin20:33

For the most part not every part, but for the most I just don't find

Leonard Slatkin20:37

That the expression in music

Leonard Slatkin20:40

Leaving Aside the Story

Leonard Slatkin20:42

reaches the level.

Leonard Slatkin20:44

The quartet playing.

Leonard Slatkin20:46

And composition does. It doesn't mean I don't know the repertoire. I certainly do. And some of the choices people think that I make are a little bit unusual to go to works as diverse as Romeo Juliette, of Gouneau, Fancio Dalest, of Puccini, Electra, Magic Flute.

Leonard Slatkin21:06

Verter, other operas I've done. These are works that have come to me later and that I find interesting now. I didn't find them that way twenty years ago or thirty years ago.

Presenter21:15

But you don't find it such a perfect form as to the same.

Leonard Slatkin21:18

Not a streamer music, no.

Presenter21:20

Okay, let's um let's have something that, as we say, does get right hits the spot, huh?

Leonard Slatkin21:25

The rhapsody on a theme of Paganini is actually the closest we'll come on this.

Leonard Slatkin21:30

Program

Leonard Slatkin21:31

To an American piece of music.

Leonard Slatkin21:34

It was written in the United States during Akronoff's long tenure.

Leonard Slatkin21:38

When Rapanov first arrived,

Leonard Slatkin21:40

Uh in the States.

Leonard Slatkin21:42

In nineteen ten,

Leonard Slatkin21:43

to play his third concerto with the New York Philharmonic, with Gustav Mahler conducting nonetheless. He was met dockside

Leonard Slatkin21:51

by my grandfather's brother, Modeste Alchuller, who was a conductor of something called the Russian Symphony Society in New York, which was an orchestra of Russian emigres. Rachmaninoff, like Schoenberg and Strabinsky, wound up settling in California. The family knew him, I didn't.

Leonard Slatkin22:06

and in his Rhapsodyname of Paganini he created for me one of the very few perfect works where not one bar or one note can be faulted in any way.

Presenter23:15

Leon Fleischer and the Cleveland Orchestra, conducted by George Sell, playing part of Rachmaninoff's rhapsody on a theme by Paganini, and that was recorded in nineteen fifty seven. What about you, Leonard Slackin, and and new music, contemporary music? There's a view that says you're a bit conservative about

Leonard Slatkin23:32

It's not entirely true, because

Leonard Slatkin23:35

When you were music director of an orchestra, as I was for seventeen years in Saint Louis and now four years in Washington,

Leonard Slatkin23:42

You have a responsibility to play the widest spectrum of music for your audience, but I purposely

Leonard Slatkin23:50

Tried.

Leonard Slatkin23:51

During those years in creating

Leonard Slatkin23:53

A sort of national profile for St. Louis and international as well to go to a music that they would play that nobody else was doing.

Leonard Slatkin24:01

And at the time, it tended to fall in the category of the conservative Americans. But it didn't mean that.

Presenter24:06

But the result was, nevertheless, you avoided what some people disparagingly call squeaky gait music.

Leonard Slatkin24:11

No, I didn't avoid it. I did it. It's just we did it only in Saint Louis.

Presenter24:14

There's a story that uh one that the cellist in in your new um orchestra, the BBC SO, um, actually smashed his cello to bits some years ago because he didn't think he wanted to abuse it with some new German music, I think it was

Leonard Slatkin24:26

That's why I have a baton. It's much easier, not as expensive.

Presenter24:30

Yeah.

Presenter24:30

But you have some sympathy with what he did?

Leonard Slatkin24:32

I did at one time. Now I think that a lot of music that seemed

Leonard Slatkin24:38

Radical.

Leonard Slatkin24:40

And avant-garde now seems curiously old-fashioned and even sentimental sometimes.

Leonard Slatkin24:46

Lucas Foss, who wrote a piece called Forion, which took the E major partita of Bach for violin solo, and literally smashed it to bits. It begins with the sound of

Leonard Slatkin24:59

A bag of Coca-Cola bottles being smashed on the floor, and then this whole piece gets destroyed as it goes on. I hate it. I heard the premiere. I was booing along with everybody else in the audience.

Leonard Slatkin25:08

To the extent that I couldn't believe somebody could write that, and I got the music.

Leonard Slatkin25:13

And started looking at it, and for years I just would pick it up and say, This is a perfect example of what I can never listen to in my life.

Leonard Slatkin25:20

And now I do the piece quite frequently.

Presenter25:22

I got number six.

Leonard Slatkin25:24

When I was sixteen years old, I got a job playing in a piano bar.

Leonard Slatkin25:28

Everything shut down at one in the morning.

Leonard Slatkin25:31

All the bars stopped serving.

Leonard Slatkin25:33

People went home, or wherever they went.

Leonard Slatkin25:36

But the musicians

Leonard Slatkin25:38

would all head to one place on the weekends.

Leonard Slatkin25:41

And that was a club called the Man Hole, Two Ends, named after and founded by the drummer Shelley Mann.

Leonard Slatkin25:49

His jazz club would shut to the public at one in the morning.

Leonard Slatkin25:53

and the musicians would all come.

Leonard Slatkin25:56

From all over town, whoever was in town.

Leonard Slatkin25:59

and they would play for each other.

Leonard Slatkin26:01

sometimes till six seven in the morning.

Leonard Slatkin26:04

I heard Rubeck.

Leonard Slatkin26:06

I heard Bill Evans.

Leonard Slatkin26:08

I heard Miles Davis. I heard combinations of these people just playing music for each other. It was like chamber music.

Leonard Slatkin26:16

One of today's successors to that heritage.

Leonard Slatkin26:19

The Dominican-born pianist Michele Camillo.

Leonard Slatkin26:24

Michele has a combination of fire in the playing and a beautifully classic lyric touch when he needs it.

Leonard Slatkin26:32

He's an artist of the first rank, and I thought we might listen to him in his guise as uh ensemble pianist.

Presenter27:11

Michele Camillo and why not? You talked earlier on, Leonard Slatkin, about doing more broadcasting along with this new BBC job. Wh what do you want to do? You've said you don't want to go on television and be seen waving your arms about conducting.

Leonard Slatkin27:21

No, if if I see another shot of uh flutes through harp strings, it I'll I'll get ill, I know it. I think that we need to use television in very much the same way that popular music has found, and that's to create imagery, let a director have imagination.

Leonard Slatkin27:41

It would be nice, for instance, to have one piece of music, but have six different directors come up with their concept of how it would look. I guess sort of a gigantic version of Fantasia, but just seen from different points of view.

Presenter27:53

Pensive.

Leonard Slatkin27:54

Yeah.

Presenter27:54

Well I'm

Leonard Slatkin27:55

Here at the BBC, I was told expense is no object. Isn't that right? I guess not.

Presenter27:57

Jake, is that isn't that right? I guess not.

Leonard Slatkin28:00

I also think that a lot needs to be done in the world of education. We're coming on a time, we're in it, where

Leonard Slatkin28:09

Proper education in the arts in this public schools, anyway, is diminishing.

Presenter28:13

By which you mean state schools, then?

Leonard Slatkin28:15

Primarily. Even here I talk to people and they say it's just not what it used to be.

Presenter28:15

Yeah.

Leonard Slatkin28:19

Our audiences are getting older because they don't have the knowledge or the background to come to concerts and they're intimidated.

Leonard Slatkin28:27

And if that really is the case

Leonard Slatkin28:29

It's our responsibility.

Leonard Slatkin28:30

to find a way

Leonard Slatkin28:32

To make music in particular.

Leonard Slatkin28:34

more accessible through knowledge.

Leonard Slatkin28:38

And to bring the audiences into it. And broadcast is the perfect medium for it, be it radio or television.

Presenter28:41

Hmm.

Presenter28:42

And you've done some of that on radio, you've done a lot on radio three, I know, but that's the point, isn't it? It's inviting people and it's making it fun at the same time as educating them.

Leonard Slatkin28:50

Not just fun, but something

Leonard Slatkin28:53

that makes you interested in what music is about, more than just the listening process. It should never be, as Bernstein used to call it, music that we hear all the time, but we never listen to. People need in all forms to understand

Leonard Slatkin29:07

what makes it wonderful, not just that it is, but why. We do it with books, we do it with film. I mean film criticism and people going to the movies come out and have massive discussions about the meaning of these works. And that's disappearing a little bit from our concert life.

Presenter29:22

You're well qualified to do all of that while we continue this advert for Slatkin on radio, slatkin on television, because you were a DJ.

Leonard Slatkin29:26

I'm slacking on Teddy.

Leonard Slatkin29:30

I was.

Leonard Slatkin29:31

And this occurred because in my first year as assistant conductor in St. Louis in 1968 I was invited by a radio station.

Leonard Slatkin29:40

which at the time was called Underground Radio. I don't know if they had such a thing here, but it was before there was public broadcasting, and these were little stations that were bound and determined to go and violate every rule of the Federal Communications Commission.

Presenter29:53

Ours was Pirate Radio.

Leonard Slatkin29:55

Right, same idea.

Leonard Slatkin29:57

So I went and I did an interview on this station.

Leonard Slatkin30:00

At the end of the interview I was invited to do a show, which always began with the music that you're hearing in the background, which is called A Rainbow with Curved Air.

Leonard Slatkin30:10

By Terry Riley, who was one of the first minimalist composers.

Leonard Slatkin30:13

And as you can hear, it's perfect music to talk over. It lasts for about twenty minutes, and there are times when I would just chat for twenty minutes and use this as the material.

Leonard Slatkin30:23

I learned a great deal. I learned about communication, the odd juxtaposition of pieces that you could put together, the fact that if it was raining one day the whole programme would be about rain, it might be about things that ended in C major, might be about artists whose last name all began with the same letter, you never knew.

Leonard Slatkin30:49

I treasured those days and I found that it helped me a great deal in my

Leonard Slatkin30:56

communication skills with audiences as the years developed. I think everybody who's in the entertainment industry in any form should spend some time doing radio. It teaches you a great deal, a great discipline.

Leonard Slatkin31:09

And this particular piece, although I certainly listened to it many times without talking over it, is a little hard to live without for me because it became very much a part of my life.

Presenter31:48

Music to talk to, A Rainbow in Curved Air by Terry Riley. So um Leonard Slackin, the plan is that you're here for, what, more than three months of the year um and then you're in Washington where you've just renewed your contract with the National Symphony Orchestra. What happens if we take you away from all of that? We reduce you to the barest essentials, put you on a desert island, how do you get on? Do you collapse or do you cope?

Leonard Slatkin32:12

I would cope.

Leonard Slatkin32:13

I would have my music with me, I would have a few books, of course.

Leonard Slatkin32:18

And I can fish. I'll be all right.

Leonard Slatkin32:23

I would

Leonard Slatkin32:25

I have to think.

Leonard Slatkin32:27

most of all about my family.

Leonard Slatkin32:29

Which brings us to the last disk we've selected.

Leonard Slatkin32:33

As we're talking, I'm fifty-six years old and I came to parenthood late.

Leonard Slatkin32:39

I have a son, Daniel, who will turn six in May.

Leonard Slatkin32:46

At the age of two,

Leonard Slatkin32:48

He made an appearance on the stage in Saint Louis.

Leonard Slatkin32:52

It was my final concert.

Leonard Slatkin32:56

A celebratory affair.

Leonard Slatkin32:58

I had a lot of friends there playing with me, and it was a really wonderful afternoon.

Leonard Slatkin33:04

The programme ended with American in Paris of Gershwin, which was a signature work for myself and the orchestra for many, many years.

Leonard Slatkin33:10

I had not planned to do any encore whatsoever. It had already been a long day.

Leonard Slatkin33:15

But after a third bow.

Leonard Slatkin33:19

The concertmaster slipped a piece of music on to the music stand, and said to the audience

Leonard Slatkin33:27

that the orchestra had requested we do one last piece together.

Leonard Slatkin33:33

To pay honour.

Leonard Slatkin33:36

To the newest slatkin.

Leonard Slatkin33:39

And it was Danny Boy in

Leonard Slatkin33:41

The arrangement by Percy Granger, which is just for strings.

Leonard Slatkin33:45

As I started it, my wife brought out

Leonard Slatkin33:49

Two year old Daniel.

Leonard Slatkin33:51

Yeah.

Speaker 333:51

Hmm.

Leonard Slatkin33:51

My father was from Saint Louis and had been the assistant concert master of the Saint Louis Symphony.

Leonard Slatkin33:57

I had been its music director and assistant conductor for many years. And now the third generation of Slatkin had stood on the stage with that orchestra, leading people to wonder that, perhaps twenty, thirty years from now, should Daniel choose to enter music, would he indeed become a third generation of Slatkin to be with the orchestra in some capacity.

Presenter35:16

Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by my castaway Leonard Slatkin playing Danny Boy. Now, this is the difficult one. If you could only take one of those eight records to your desert island, which one would you take?

Leonard Slatkin35:26

The last one.

Presenter35:28

What about your book? We give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare.

Leonard Slatkin35:33

Probably James Baldwin's notes of a native sun.

Leonard Slatkin35:37

because it would remind me constantly

Leonard Slatkin35:39

of the difficult struggle so many people have to achieve equality in the world.

Presenter35:44

And you are allowed a luxury.

Leonard Slatkin35:47

If I knew I was going to be on the island

Leonard Slatkin35:49

and I had enough time to prepare to get it.

Leonard Slatkin35:52

I would go into my wine cellar.

Leonard Slatkin35:55

and probably pick a lovely Rescale from about eighty-four.

Leonard Slatkin36:01

so I could at least have one good last bottle of wine.

Presenter36:06

And we give you a corkscrew too.

Presenter36:09

Leonard Slatkin, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Leonard Slatkin36:12

My pleasure. Thank you.

Speaker 236:21

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.