Leonard Slatkin lets rip at Tommasini and pals

The “colorful” blogger is James Jorden, of Parterre.com, always knocking Slipped Disc but a reader anyway, and lately of the failing New York Times, where his buddy, the inexperienced Zachary Woolfe, serves as “classical music editor.”

Slatkin deserved much better — from the Met press office as much as from the Gray Lady — and would have been justified in suing for defamation.

A few weeks after the Met debacle, Slatkin gave his first – and most extensive — interview about what happened from his point of view to the Detroit Free Press, where I was the classical music critic and arts reporter. He spoke in detail about his conflict with Angela Gheorghiu, the problems on opening night that led to the Times’ review and what he saw as the abdication of responsibility on the part of Met management in not stepping into the breach. This latter point is particularly interesting to me, because whether you think Slatkin did or did not know the score or that Gheorghiu sabotaged the conductor or not, it was obvious to Met leadership that there was a problem before the production opened. Slatkin’s account suggests that Met general manager Peter Gelb’s unwillingness to broker a compromise or solution -– even if it meant replacing the conductor at the 11th hour -– was tantamount to allowing the fuse of a stick of dynamite to continue burning. We all know how that turned out.

Here’s the story from June 6, 2010.

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It wasn’t the devastating reviews and Internet gossip per se that most upset Leonard Slatkin in the wake of his controversial departure from the Metropolitan Opera’s “La Traviata” in April. It was the widely repeated assumption — influenced, he says, by a major misreading of his online diary — that he arrived unprepared to conduct Verdi’s masterpiece.

“I never said that,” said Slatkin, music director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, speaking in his office at the Max M. Fisher Music Center. “I was maybe even too prepared. I knew this opera inside out; I could have almost conducted from memory.”

Slatkin, 65, who withdrew from “La Traviata” after one performance, became a lightning rod for criticism and the brouhaha was a public relations embarrassment. He addressed the issue for the first time in an interview Monday with the Free Press, dissecting the opening night debacle, defending his preparation and detailing the conflict with the gifted but temperamental Romanian superstar soprano Angela Gheorghiu.

Slatkin did not completely absolve himself from blame and admitted he made mistakes opening night. But what he called Gheorghiu’s “unprofessional behavior” — blocking his view of other singers, taking outrageous liberties that went beyond liberal notions of expressive phrasing, entering early and ignoring cut-offs — so unnerved him that he lost his cool in the second act.

“It rarely happens to me, but I got thrown,” said Slatkin. “All of a sudden, I was saying, ‘What the hell is going on?’ and there were places where I knew I was wrong, but I didn’t know what to do. I was pretty much up in the air.

“At the end of the second act, there is a big ensemble number. It is one place where everybody needs to look at the conductor. They’re all holding notes and I give the cut-offs. She held on past everybody on every one. I can’t say it was on purpose because I don’t know. But it was not in league at all with what anybody else was doing. There was no feeling of cohesion.”

Slatkin’s career has been a roller coaster recently. He suffered a heart attack in November but recovered to lead the DSO on a successful Florida tour in February and signed a two-year extension to his contract. The Met was a low point, but last week he added the music directorship of the Orchestre National de Lyon in France to his portfolio.

The Met fallout diverted attention from the transformative leadership he has brought to the DSO, and it may slow the rehabilitation of his national image, which slipped when his tenure at the National Symphony in Washington, D.C., ended lukewarmly.

The saga began when the Met canceled a revival of John Corigliano’s “The Ghosts of Versailles,” a contemporary work Slatkin was scheduled to conduct. Slatkin was instead offered “La Traviata.”

“At first, I said I would not do the switch,” he wrote on his blog, leonardslatkin.com. Then came the words that would be widely quoted as evidence that he arrived unprepared.

“After all, this is an opera I had never conducted and the first real repertoire standard for me at the Met. But after a while, I concluded that since everyone else in the house knew it, I would learn a great deal from the masters. There was a lot of digging for me to do. I consumed books about the composer and the work’s history. Listening to a few recordings was helpful but confusing. What constituted tradition and why? This was a question I would ask often during rehearsals.”

New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini wrote in a strongly worded, influential review that he had “seldom heard such faulty coordination between a conductor and cast at the Met.” He put the blame mostly on Slatkin for showing up at rehearsals “not fully knowing the score” and for his awkward handling of accompaniment patterns key to Verdi’s style.

Slatkin said Monday that his reference to learning from the masters — in this case Gheorghiu and baritone Thomas Hampson — did not mean he needed them to learn the music but only that he wanted to absorb their experience and command of tradition. Slatkin said he entered rehearsals with his own ideas, from treating the Prelude in a more restrained manner than usual to other decisions about mood, pacing and phrasing. While many ran counter to convention, he said they were met with open minds from the cast, artistic staff and orchestra.

Slatkin said Gheorghiu was spot-on at early rehearsals but trouble began when he stepped beyond music and made a suggestion about the staging of her character’s death scene. After Violetta dies, Slatkin proposed that to animate the final bars, the last gesture should be left to Alfredo, who would look up to God as if to say, “Why me?”

“Angela was having none of that,” said Slatkin. “The last gesture should be hers. It didn’t seem like a big thing at the time, but I think it was.”

Gheorghiu, 44, is regarded as one of the world’s leading sopranos, but she has also earned a reputation as a willful artist with a history of diva behavior resulting in firings, cancellations and other imbroglios. Speaking for the singer, her general manager Jack Mastroianni, senior vice president at IMG Artists, declined to respond to Slatkin’s version of what happened.

“Angela Gheorghiu respects Leonard Slatkin.” he said in a statement. “She enthusiastically welcomed a collaboration when she learned the maestro was to conduct John Corigliano’s ‘The Ghost of Versailles’ as the Metropolitan Opera originally scheduled. What happened when the Met switched the opera to Verdi’s ‘La Traviata’ is factually described by maestro Slatkin in his personal blog and reported in detail by Anthony Tommasini, New York Times chief music critic.”

Hampson was traveling in Russia and could not be reached for comment.

Gheorghiu later skipped a key rehearsal claiming fatigue and at the dress rehearsal, said Slatkin, “went off the charts” — singing flat, missing entrances and distorting phrases beyond recognition. Slatkin faults Met management for not stepping in to broker a musical resolution.

“If we still couldn’t work it out, then one of us would have had to go, but it should have happened after the dress rehearsal,” he said.

Instead, Slatkin said he was reassured that everything was fine by Met officials, including general manager Peter Gelb, who met him in the pit after the rehearsal. “I said, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ ” Slatkin recalled. “And he said, ‘Whatever you’re doing, just keep it that way. I know she’s difficult, but you’re doing fine.’ ”

Met press director Peter Clark said the company would not comment on questions posed by the Free Press, including why officials didn’t act aggressively to resolve the problems and whether Gheorghiu threatened to walk out of the opera if Slatkin remained.

Slatkin went to see Gheorghiu just before the performance to ask if there was anything specific she wished him to do. He said she mentioned two spots in the score but otherwise told him to “listen and watch.” The first act went fine, he said, but in the second she reverted to her dress rehearsal behavior.

“I was so focused on trying to keep together with her, I forgot about other people on stage at times,” said Slatkin. “At one point, I completely missed a cadence with Tom.”

Slatkin said he resigned because of the barrage of negative coverage and his feeling that the situation would not improve. R. Douglas Sheldon, Slatkin’s manager and senior vice president and director at Columbia Artists Management, said the conductor was never specifically asked to leave but Met officials intimated to Sheldon that it would be best if Slatkin withdrew. Met officials declined comment.

Slatkin said he is not bitter about the experience but especially regrets that because of his association with the DSO the situation reflected poorly on Detroit. But he is ready to move on.

“If you can’t recover from negatives you shouldn’t be in this business,” he said. “I’ve had enough negatives, but I’ve had a lot more positives.”