Leonard Slatkin

Leonard Edward Slatkin (born September 1, 1944) is an American conductor, author and composer.

Slatkin was born in Los Angeles to a musical family that came from areas of the Russian Empire now in Ukraine. His father, Felix Slatkin, was the violinist, conductor and founder of the Hollywood String Quartet, and his mother, Eleanor Aller, was the cellist with the quartet. His brother, Frederick, now a cellist, traced the family's original name as Zlotkin, and adopted that form of the family surname for himself professionally. Frederick Zlotkin has spoken of the family lineage as follows:

Slatkin studied at Indiana University and Los Angeles City College before attending the Juilliard School where he studied conducting under Jean Morel. He also studied with Walter Susskind at the Aspen Music Festival and School.

His conducting debut came in 1966 when he became artistic director and conductor of the award-winning New York Youth Symphony, and in 1968, Walter Susskind named him the assistant conductor of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra. While in St. Louis, Slatkin hosted for three years a weekly KDNA radio station program called The Slatkin Project. He left St. Louis in 1977 to become music director of the New Orleans Symphony.

He led a series of Beethoven festivals with the San Francisco Symphony during the late 1970s and early 1980s. These annual concerts, held during June, included the orchestra's final concert in San Francisco's War Memorial Opera House in 1980, which featured a performance of Beethoven's ninth symphony.

...
Wikipedia