That night on September 15th [2001] I turned to the audience and I talked to them about the music for mourning, what we do in tragic times . . . . Once we started I couldn't tell you what happened. But I did know that something was overtaking us on stage. By the end, I was in tears, the audience was weeping, and somehow we got through it . . . . I think we learned something very important from this. That it's still possible to have a piece of music move us in a way that words cannot.
Leonard Slatkin is the Arthur R. Metz Foundation Conductor at IU's Jacobs School of Music and the Distinguished Artist in Residence at the American University.
He has enjoyed a long career conducting some of the most prestigious orchestras in the world. During the seventeen years with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, he increased the reputation of the orchestra with a vast output of high-quality recordings.
His list of recordings include the standard symphonies ranging from Haydn to Elgar, while his artistry as a conductor appears the most in his performance of twentieth-century composers.
