The Detroit Symphony Orchestra's performances at the 2013 Spring for Music festival represent a dramatic reversal of fortunes, and one that can only happen among modern-day American orchestras, writes Elliott Forrest in the blog of New York classical music station WQXR-FM.
The DSO was scheduled to play one concert at this, the third annual festival of offbeat and interesting programming at Carnegie Hall. But it was pressed into service for a second concert when the Oregon Symphony suddenly announced in October that it was pulling out of the festival because of financial problems. Detroit, an orchestra with a recent history of financial troubles of its own, agreed to take Oregon's place, adopting half of its program along with its flamboyant soloist.
In an interview with WQXR's Elliott Forrest, Detroit music director Leonard Slatkin explained how he built a coherent program by keeping Kurt Weill's Seven Deadly Sins, featuring the Portland-based part-time Pink Martini singer Storm Large, and Ravel's La Valse. "Now it was a question of coming up with what we had comfortably in the repertoire that we thought demonstrated an aspect of Detroit," Slatkin said. Two lesser-known Rachmaninov pieces were slotted in: the symphonic poems Isle of the Dead and the Caprice bohémien, both recorded by the DSO last fall.
