Slatkin wallops, Kern Rachs
Slatkin wallops, Kern Rachs with the NSO
Olga Kern & Leonard Slatkin backstage at the Kennedy Center on Thursday night.
Leonard Slatkin’s dozen years as music director of the National Symphony Orchestra were a mixed bag, with him arriving to great fanfare from the then-spectacularly-successful St. Louis Symphony but gradually wearing audiences out with programming that was more interesting on paper than in performance, and sometimes lackadaisical preparation. But a great many of the NSO players today were hired by him, and his return for subscription concerts this week seemed to invoke only bonhomie and good audience response. Certainly, the programming was vintage Slatkin: an agglomeration, assembled by him, of variations on a single theme by eleven different composers (including himself, his son, and his wife); the rarely-heard Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 1, with pianist Olga Kern; and the Copland Third Symphony; everything delivered pretty much as expected.
The 24th Caprice by Paganini has stirred the imaginations of numerous composers through the centuries, from Brahms, Schumann, and Rachmaninoff on down. Slatkin’s assemblage (titled Yet Another Set of Variations), was an expansion of a collection begun in 1996 as a farewell tribute when he departed St. Louis, and essentially doubling in size this year when he turned 75. The piece now encompasses contributions by famous names like Tower, Bolcom, and Corigliano. It is full of “in jokes” in the P.D.Q. Bach mode; Hava Nagila, Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin, Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony, John Williams film music, tango, and other ephemera. Slatkin arranged and ordered the variations, in some cases composing connective tissue. There have been examples of this sort of thing throughout musical history (Diabelli Variations, FAE Sonata), and they are never more than curiosities or snapshots of a moment in the culture. Just as a painting composed and jointly executed by numerous artists could never equal the work of a single master, so too do these composition-by-committee pieces fail to achieve anything more than momentary entertainment. It was fun to listen to Yet Another Set of Variations once – humor in music is exquisitely hard to pull off – and Slatkin has earned the right to be indulged a little at this point in his career, but that’s all this was. The performance itself was a carnival for the full percussion section, among others, and the orchestra seemed to handle the difficulties well, with a few seams showing
Surprisingly, this was Olga Kern’s NSO debut; a seasoned artist who has appeared in the DC area several other times. It was a canny choice to bring a wonderful and rarely-performed work like Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 1 (his first published composition, written when he was just 18, leaning somewhat on Tchaikovsky and Grieg). The integration of piano and orchestra is rudimentary, and there are none of the exquisite dialogs that marked his more popular second and third essays. But the keyboard writing itself is already a cynosure by itself; athletic, coruscating, and expressive. And Rachmaninoff’s trademark dark, brooding tone, his soundprint, is fully present. Slatkin made something of a specialty of this composer throughout his career, so it was strange to find him lagging behind Kern in several spots as if unfamiliar with the work. And his emphasis on stick technique over expressive freedom doesn’t bring the best results in this repertoire. But Kern’s virtuosity carried the day (capped off by a pounding Prokofiev Etude from his Op. 2 for an encore). She should come back soon.
Another of Slatkin’s specialties is American music, and his St. Louis recording of the Copland Third is among the finest (he also was the last conductor to take the NSO through it, 11 years ago). This grandiose war-time effort is as close as we come to the Great American Symphony, and it should be heard here in D.C. more often. Slatkin captured both the jerky energy of the second movement and the extreme delicacy of the Andantino with sophistication and skill. The performance was not perfectly disciplined, with small flubs emerging here and there; Slatkin is not always as meticulous or demanding as he could be in rehearsal. Still, this music was in his and the NSO’s wheelhouse, and the power of the piece packed a wallop.
