This caught my attention – famed conductor Leonard Slatkin publicly criticized for a recent performance. Tim Smith, music critic from Baltimore, tells us this:
word came that conductor Leonard Slatkin had withdrawn from his remaining scheduled performances of “La Traviata” at the Metropolitan Opera. The rocky opening night had been on Monday.Slatkin had never conducted that work before and, by his own admission on his blog (according to various reports), wasn’t fully prepared. I happened to hear, thanks to the Met’s channel on Sirius-XM, the final act of Monday’s performance while driving home from DC.I remember thinking that the poignant prelude to that act had no distinguishing interpretive characteristics. I didn’t think the rest was wretchedly conducted, so much as impersonally. (I rather liked some of the singing, though, by Angela Gheorghiu and James Valenti as the unlucky lovers in the opera.) From what I’ve read, things were far from ideal during the rest of the evening, and the blame was laid at Slatkin’s dressing room door. This sort of thing is nearly unthinkable at such an august institution.
Paul Carey says