In Saturday’s (8/18) Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), Sarah Bryan Miller writes, “If you’ve attended a concert led by Leonard Slatkin, you’ve probably seen the conductor turn around on the podium and heard him talk: about the music on the program, about baseball, about life in general. If you have, you’ll recognize his voice in his new book, ‘Conducting Business: Unveiling the Mystery Behind the Maestro.’ Part memoir, part how-to, it deserves a place on the shelf with soprano Renée Fleming’s now-classic ‘The Inner Voice.’ Slatkin, former music director for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and currently at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and France’s Orchestre National de Lyon, didn’t use a ghost writer. … It took him two years, grabbing hours on airplanes and in hotel rooms, to get it all down. … He didn’t set out to write an autobiography. ‘I thought it was only going to be about the challenges facing conductors, and overcoming them. I found that in order to do that, in order to get my perspective on it, I had to go back and write about my life.’ … He is frank about almost everything, including his December 2009 heart attack (suffered on the podium in Rotterdam) and the March 2010 Metropolitan Opera ‘La traviata’ debacle, in which soprano Angela Gheorghiu played ugly diva games and Slatkin was forced to withdraw.”
Posted August 23, 2012
