February 10, 2022

Leonard Slatkin’s new CD, Slatkin Conducts Slatkin (Naxos), featuring the MSM Symphony Orchestra, is released on Friday, February 11.

This is the same day the celebrated conductor/composer, MSM trustee, and MSM Distinguished Visiting Artist in Conducting and Orchestral Studies returns to his familiar place on the Neidorff-Karpati Hall podium to conduct the MSM Symphony Orchestra (at 7:30 pm).

About Slatkin Conducts Slatkin

Internationally acclaimed conductor Leonard Slatkin celebrated his 75th birthday in September 2019, and selections from his new recording, Slatkin Conducts Slatkin, were recorded at an MSM Icons concert at Manhattan School of Music given in his honor on October 18, 2019. Other compositions on the CD are performed by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, where Maestro Slatkin is Music Director Laureate.

The new recording includes works composed by Maestro Slatkin, who in notes to the album writes, “most people know me as a conductor, some have read my blogs and books, and some have even seen my piano-playing on display a couple of times. But not many know that I have been active as a composer, almost from the time I was born.”

For his composition The Raven, Leonard makes use of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem in a work that is “almost like a concerto for speaker and orchestra.” On the CD, it is narrated by actor Alec Baldwin and performed by the MSM Symphony Orchestra, part of the maestro’s October 2019 75th-birthday concert recorded in MSM’s Neidorff-Karpati Hall.

Selections also pay tribute to his remarkable musical family, both past and present. Historical recordings include Maestro Slatkin’s cellist mother, Eleanor Aller, being conducted by Erich Wolfgang Korngold in an excerpt from the Finale of the Haydn Cello Concerto in D major and his violinist father, Felix, featured on a 1944 broadcast recording of the Army Air Forces Training Command Orchestra performing Brahms. Slatkin Conducts Slatkin also includes In Fields, a composition by Leonard’s son, Daniel Slatkin, a rising star in the world of film music.

Watch a video preview of Slatkin Conducts Slatkin featuring the MSM Symphony Orchestra:

About the concert at MSM on February 11, 2022

Leonard Slatkin will conduct the MSM Symphony Orchestra on Friday, February 11, at 7:30 PM in MSM’s Neidorff-Karpati Hall. The concert is open to the public, with proof of vaccination and i.d. Masks must be worn inside MSM.

On the program:

TOSHIO HOSOKAWA Blossoming II

BENJAMIN LEES Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra

WITOLD LUTOSŁAWSKI Concerto for Orchestra