“Kinah”: Leonard Slatkin’s Musical Elegy to his Parents

Elegies are, by nature, solemn, reflective, and reverent. They function as musical or poetic tombstones. Leonard Slatkin’s Kinah, premiered by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in December, 2015, is all of these things. It’s also music filled with ghosts and faint echoes of distant, haunting voices.

Leonard Slatkin grew up in Los Angeles in a prominent musical family. His father, Felix Slatkin, was concertmaster of the Twentieth Century Fox studio orchestra and a frequent conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. His mother, Eleanor Aller, was principal cellist of the Warner Brothers Orchestra. Together, they founded the Hollywood String Quartet. In 1963, they were scheduled to solo with the Glendale Symphony, performing Brahms’ Double Concerto. But the performance never took place. Felix suffered a fatal heart attack between the rehearsals and the concert. He was 47.

“Kinah” is the Hebrew word for “elegy.” It often refers to a sung lamentation. In Slatkin’s Kinah, offstage flugelhorn, trumpet, violin, and cello evoke distant, far off memories. The solo trumpet is reminiscent of the plaintive, soulful voice we hear in Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question. Throughout the piece, we hear a fragment of this famous melody from the second movement of Brahms’ Double Concerto. Brahms’ expansive melody rises with a sense of aspiration. But in Kinah, it is always interrupted and left unfulfilled. In Brahms’ Double Concerto, the violin and cello enter into an intimate dialogue. In the final bars of Kinah, we catch a fleeting glimpse of this intimacy. We’re reminded of the ephemeral nature of mortality.

Leonard Slatkin is currently Music Director of the Detroit Symphony. Here, he leads the second performance of Kinah. Fittingly, Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony (a piece which also uses offstage instruments) rounded out the 2015 program.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2Yspxl7ytc

Next week we’ll explore a few of the Hollywood String Quartet’s legendary recordings.

Photograph by Cybelle Codish

About Timothy Judd

A native of Upstate New York, Timothy Judd has been a member of the Richmond Symphony violin section since 2001. He is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music where he earned the degrees Bachelor of Music and Master of Music, studying with world renowned Ukrainian-American violinist Oleh Krysa.

The son of public school music educators, Timothy Judd began violin lessons at the age of four through Eastman’s Community Education Division. He was a student of Anastasia Jempelis, one of the earliest champions of the Suzuki method in the United States.

A passionate teacher, Mr. Judd has maintained a private violin studio in the Richmond area since 2002 and has been active coaching chamber music and numerous youth orchestra sectionals.

In his free time, Timothy Judd enjoys working out with Richmond’s popular SEAL Team Physical Training program.

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