Opening Night at the Schermerhorn
The Burden of History: Leonard Slatkin Begins Again in Nashville
It was once said of Joe Cocker that, on any given night, he could be either a prized cultural treasure or a dinosaur with an approach and style deemed dated and inauthentic. Of course, this was the peculiar burden of an epic career—one that stretched across decades and left an indelible mark on the arc of popular music through the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. It is a strange, self-reflexive anxiety of influence that every great artist of a certain age must eventually confront: How do you remain vital when so much of what you have done has already become history?
Pop artists rarely have the opportunity to answer that question over the course of a long career. Conductors, however, routinely do. There is little surprise, then, that a similar tension surrounds the arrival of the great Leonard Slatkin, a conductor with decades more experience than Cocker, and who, this past weekend, began his new tenure at Nashville as the oldest (from what I can tell) full-time Music Director in the U.S.
Before and upon his arrival at the Schermerhorn, there were plenty of signs of a new era. The Symphony and its new director have been appearing all over town—throwing out first pitches, conducting community orchestras, and making the rounds of Nashville’s cultural life. Inside the Schermerhorn, members of the organization left hand written personal notes of welcome (mine came from the librarian), discounted wine was available, and a giant illuminated “80/20” sign celebrated both the Nashville Symphony’s 80th anniversary and the Schermerhorn’s 20th. The hall was brimming with excitement before the concert.
After the traditional singing of the National Anthem, the concert opened wonderfully with an eloquent presentation of Joan Tower’s Made in America, which incorporates “America the Beautiful” in a series of increasingly searching, and sometimes antagonistic variations. Here, the program note reminds us that Slatkin’s championing of American composers like Tower is hardly new. Indeed, during his previous tenure as the Symphony’s Music Advisor, from 2005 to 2008, he oversaw the opening of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. It was during that first season that Tower’s piece was first heard in Nashville. Since then, Slatkin has never been far away. In 2025, he returned as an advisor during the transition following Maestro Giancarlo Guerrero’s departure and the search for a new music director—a process that ultimately led to Slatkin taking the position himself the following February.
That history is fascinating, but it is not entirely unprecedented. In 1951, Maestro Thor Johnson, then conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, also assisted Nashville in its search for a new conductor. Nashville subsequently hired its second conductor, Guy Taylor. Sixteen years after that, Johnson himself became Nashville’s fourth conductor.
The second selection of the evening was Samuel Barber’s plaintive Adagio for Strings, performed in memory of the victims of the catastrophes of September 11, 2001. It was a beautiful interpretation; the Nashville Symphony’s strings have long been one of the ensemble’s greatest strengths. As I listened to those long, aching melodic lines, I thought of Slatkin’s famous performance of the same piece on September 15, 2001, on the final night of the BBC Proms. An excellent video of that performance remains available on YouTube, and it still instills chills.
The Adagio is one of Slatkin’s “signature works.” He first conducted it at Aspen in 1964 and has since performed it with at least six orchestras I could document, including Nashville, the National Symphony, Aspen, Detroit, the BBC Symphony, and St. Louis, but one assumes many more. He has recorded it three times and is scheduled to conduct it again next January in Singapore with the Orchestra of the Music Makers.
All of which raises an interesting question: What does more than six decades of familiarity with a piece reveal—and what might it conceal? Slatkin knows every contour of Barber’s score, but would a younger conductor approach those same long lines with a different kind of uncertainty, excitement, or even fear? There is something compelling about hearing a familiar masterpiece through the ears of someone who might have a different, new interpretation of its meaning.
The next work, Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, was my favorite of the evening. It is a beautiful and rarely heard piece, and Slatkin deftly managed the dynamics of the choir and its blend with the orchestra in Bernstein’s sophisticated weaving of textures. Boy Soprano Logan Harris deserves special mention for a magnificent performance.
The work’s political message at its composition—an appeal for peace in another era when Israel was at war—was subtle but apparent in the Maestro’s opening remarks and in the work’s contrasts, brilliantly realized by Tucker Biddlecombe’s well-prepared ensemble, between Christian choral traditions and Jewish liturgical traditions.
After intermission, and an introduction by the composer, Cristina Spinei’s Strut! was performed. The syncopated rhythms, carefully composed by Spinei to depict the “sound and cadence of many people walking,” were passed around the orchestra fluently and evenly under Slatkin’s direction. It is clear that the orchestra is well acquainted with, and quite comfortable performing under, its new director’s baton. Given the number of times he has performed with this ensemble, that really isn’t surprising.
Next up was Aaron Copland’s Old American Songs, featuring five “diverse” but quite famous singers, as the Maestro called them—a curious term given that they were all white. Perhaps by “diverse” he meant country and pop singers? In any case, the performance was mixed. “At the River” was beautiful, and “I Bought Me a Cat” was hilarious and very well done, including the obligatory apologies for the final verse. However, there was also a rushed entrance, and the tempo of “The Dodger” seemed a little slower than I might have liked. A wide continuum of tempi is essential to that song’s success. Storm Large in particular, had such an amazing presence, even among these stars of Nashville, that I went home and explored some of her amazing work with the band Pink Martini. (see especially “Quizás, quizás, quizás” here).
George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture closed the program in what felt like a somewhat token effort to include music rooted in BIPOC musical traditions in an otherwise markedly blanched program. Perhaps this is unfair, the program does contain works from two living, American, female composers—a triumph by any measure. And compared with the opening programs of other orchestras in the region, Nashville’s concert stands out for its celebration of Americana.
Specifically, the Atlanta Symphony’s opening features a more conservative, mostly Brahms program led by the amazing Nathalie Stutzmann, continuing its emphasis on the “key pillars of the Romantic Repertoire.” Similarly, Louisville is opening with a Prokofiev and Brahms pairing. The standout there however, is its second concert, at the Ogle Center at IU, featuring Yuja Wang conducting from the piano. The River City is opening with Mason Bates’s Cello Concerto, while Knoxville opens with An American in Paris paired with William Grant Still’s Afro-American Symphony.
I always forget how lucky we are in Middle Tennessee, with so many orchestras within a couple of hours drive. It is remarkably easy to get a hotel and turn an evening of music into an enchanting weekend away.
The Nashville Symphony gifted us an encore to end the night: a mashup of Bizet’s Carmen with Copland’s Hoedown, performed at a blazing tempo. It sounded very Tom and Jerry—by which I mean that the music was hugely virtuosic in the service of silliness—and I chuckled despite myself as I watched the Maestro and his “diverse” singers dance back out on to the stage wearing giant cowboy hats.
As the evening ended and folks spilled out into the noisy night, there was a smile on the faces of everyone around me as they celebrated Music City’s new cultural treasure. I think I even heard someone say the word “renaissance.” After all, the dinosaurs are long extinct, right?
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Joseph E. Morgan is a father of two, husband, teacher and recovering guitarist in Middle Tennessee.
