The Tartan

By Arden Ryan

On Feb. 18, the Carnegie Mellon Philharmonic and Chorus will take the stage at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall under the baton of Maestro Leonard Slatkin, an internationally renowned conductor with a longtime connection to Pittsburgh. The free-for-students performance will feature the music of immigrant composers who found success in the United States and celebrate diversity in orchestral music.

Although Slatkin has a long relationship with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (PSO) going back nearly 40 years, he told The Tartan that he has never before played with students at Carnegie Mellon. Coming back to Pittsburgh often, the city has a long and storied history in the orchestral world, Slatkin said, and is a place he’s excited to be returning to work with aspiring musicians.

The Pittsburgh Symphony was “one of the major orchestras” in the 1940s and 50s, led by legendary music directors such as William Steinberg and Lorin Maazel, and now by Manfred Honeck, who made his conducting career in the city, Slatkin said. He said he’s grateful for the PSO as “one of the first orchestras to take an interest in” him, bringing him on as an occasional guest conductor and then the principal guest conductor.

“I was able to bring usually some different repertoire to the orchestra introducing a lot of pieces, not only for Pittsburgh audiences but some works were given their world premiere by me at the Pittsburgh Symphony,” Slatkin said. Alongside his career conducting industry professionals, Slatkin relishes working with and learning from student musicians and is excited to finally be playing with Carnegie Mellon’s orchestra.

“Even though I’m not a music director anymore, I keep a very active conducting life. But part of that activity is concerned with education, and working with young people,” Slatkin said. Each year he chooses new schools to visit to “get a feeling for where we are with education and training for potential musicians entering the professional field,” those who play recreationally and those who dream of joining a professional symphony.

“My job is to see where we are right now” in the orchestra world, Slatkin said. “Are we attracting the best students we can, both from this country and from abroad? And what is the level these days of classically trained musicians in the United States?”

Having played at universities across the country, Slatkin remarked on the “astonishing technical level of students these days” and attested that “these young people, in many cases technically can play sometimes as well as their colleagues who are professionals in the field.” His role as conductor is then to bring out a level of finesse beyond the technical aspects of the music, which young people primarily focus on.

“Part of my job when I conduct a young orchestra is to bring them into the heart and soul of the music, to get past the notes,” he said, getting students deep into the music “more than just focusing on the notes themselves.”

Sunday’s program will include three classical pieces written by composers who were not born in the United States, but who resided here when writing their great works, Slatkin said.

The concert will open with a selection highlighting the string section, a concerto by Ernest Bloch, a Swiss-born immigrant to the U.S. The Bloch number will be followed by Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms for chorus and orchestra, incorporating both music groups at Carnegie Mellon into the performance and balancing out the first piece with a woodwind feature.

Slatkin remarked how unusual it is to work with the chorus at a school as a guest, a chance he doesn’t often get, but “here is that opportunity and this is a wonderful piece to do it,” he said. “One of the most extraordinary pieces in the repertoire for choral forces.”

The night will close with the “main course of the program,” Bartok’s “Concerto for Orchestra,” a “great work of the orchestral repertoire,” bringing together all the sections at once. Bartok, Slatkin noted, became a citizen of the U.S. fleeing war in Hungary.

Slatkin will be rehearing on campus every day this week leading up to the performance. With the students having prepared the technical aspects in advance, beginning rehearsals for this repertoire last Tuesday, Slatkin can come in and get to the heart of “what this music means” with the university ensemble, he said. “That’s really what you’re trying to do.”

Sunday’s concert will feature 91 students in the orchestra, which varies concert to concert depending on the needs of the pieces being performed, and 55 students in the chorus. These groups include undergraduate and master’s of music students. Both ensembles hold to a professional rehearsal schedule, having just two weeks to prepare before the concert, said Dan Fernandez, director of marketing and communications at the School of Music.

Preparing their own part ahead of time, each group rehearsal focuses on the “nuances of making music,” Fernandez told The Tartan. The ensembles practice for two and a half hours, Tuesday through Friday, and will hold a dress rehearsal the day of the concert.

The evening’s theme aims to remind the audience of the great contributions foreign-born composers have added to the landscape of symphonic repertoire. Each piece, written in the 1940s in postwar America, recalls a shared heritage of immigration in the United States, a country that “understood the ravages” of the Second World War and welcomed the artistic efforts of new citizens.

“It’s important as a philosophy here to remind ourselves that this nation was founded by people who weren’t from here,” but whose works were embraced by American audiences, Slatkin said. “We should be welcoming of those people who are wonderfully gifted and should be given opportunities that they do not have in the lands where they live.”