March 7 and 8, 2025
Meymandi Concert Hall
Raleigh, North Carolina – USA
North Carolina Symphony; Leonard Slatkin, conductor; Olga Kern, piano.
Cindy McTEE: Timepiece (2000)
Sergei RACHMANINOFF: Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, op. 18
Pyotr TCHAIKOVSKY: Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, op. 74 (“Pathetique”)*
*omitted in the matinee concert
Christopher Hill | 10 MAR 2025
Over the last half-century, California-born Leonard Slatkin has been one of our nation’s best-known conductors. With about 200 recordings to his credit (plus perhaps half as many compilations and re-releases), there are few post-Baroque repertoires to which he has not brought his own considerable musical insights. His Haydn is superb, his Vaughan Williams and Copland are superb, and (as seen in today’s concert) he is superb at bringing contemporary music to vivid life. Perhaps that is because he himself composes. This reviewer has previously missed any opportunity to audition Slatkin live, so today’s concert, in which the maestro led the North Carolina Symphony, was highly anticipated.
The concert opened with the approximately seven-minute Timepiece of Cindy McTee, composed for the centenary (2000) season of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Like other Boomer composers in the same period, McTee has eschewed the doctrinal approach to music that characterized American academic composition for several decades (especially after the 1940s), freely mashing up disparate sonic resources from our culture’s musical past.
Prominent among these resources in Timepiece are (what I call) “stuffed chords” (for example, recognizable first-inversion chords with added internal tone clusters, octatonic harmonies from expressionistic music of 1900–1960, and minor second/major seventh/minor ninth dyads from analytical music from the same period. Add to this a timbral palette that, as with so many Boomer composers, blends pure and mixed instrumental choirs with prominent percussion and you have all the resources needed for a powerful classical music vocabulary.
Of course, resources are one thing; the devil remains always in the details. But the details are just where McTee shines. Her seven minutes of sound tapestry were entirely coherent, thanks to a combination of striking melodic, harmonic, and especially rhythmic gestures deployed within a clear and attractive architecture.
Slatkin conducted this relatively difficult work with great energy and precision, and although Timepiece is new to this reviewer, he can confidently say that in their rendition the Raleigh ensemble displayed the sort of professional excellence one associates with a major orchestra. As for the audience, mostly comprising ears older than McTee’s, it seemed genuinely entertained by Timepiece, and it’s fair to say her music’s impact is genuine and likely enduring. McTee was present for the performance and took a composer’s bow at the end of her piece.

Composer Cindy McTee takes a bow with conductor Leonard Slatkin. (credit: Chris Hill)
Second on the program was the angelic Olga Kern performing Rachmaninoff’s best-known piano concerto. The year after McTee wrote Timepiece for Dallas, Kern received the Gold Medal at the Van Cliburn Competition in Ft. Worth. A quarter century later, Kern has maintained her willowy figure while (considerably) elevating its wardrobe. At today’s concert she was stunning in a posh white sheath sprinkled with glittering gold thread. The program book did not say who the designer was, but her Facebook page often shares that sort of information for those interested.
To be sure, Kern does not trespass into Vera Wang or earlier Lady Gaga territory; no bare midriffs or cold-cut negligeés for her! That said, she appears to be as potentially comfortable on fashion runways as anyone in classical music today. And this reviewer has no problem with this: If you’ve got it, flaunt it. At the same time, your reviewer fervently wishes that he could report a growth in her musicality concomitant with the growth in her wardrobe budget.
In the early aughts he was present at and duly impressed by several of her post-Cliburn concerts. For the last couple of years, though, he has noticed that her live playing, both in solo and concerted music, tends to a pitiless, percussive tone. It’s almost as if she’s bored with being an eye-catching super-virtuoso.
Kern certainly gets the notes right. But in the first movement of the Rachmaninoff Second Concerto, it was not until the rueful coda that she seemed to play with any real sense of involvement, following ten minutes or so of expert banging. (I would blame the piano for this, but I have heard the same instrument sound differently under different hands.)
As intimated, Kern’s keen musical sensibility (as well as her emotional intelligence) was evident in certain features of the first-movement coda; unfortunately, the North Carolina Symphony was clearly not familiar with her interpretative approach and so forged ahead of her inappropriately during her most thoughtful extended passage. At the end of the movement, the audience applauded enthusiastically and received brief but courteous acknowledgment from the pianist.
In the tender-hearted second movement, Kern remained demonstrably engaged with the composer, and the results were quite often touching. When the results were less than touching (for this reviewer), the cause was inevitably due to hardness of tone — that is, to passages that lacked any singing quality.
Kern’s genius was most evident in her interpretation of the last movement, in which she brought out numerous musical lines one normally misses. Unfortunately, again, the orchestra was out of sync with her about half the time, which prevented her vision of Rachmaninoff’s masterpiece from being clearly articulated. It would be interesting to hear a well-rehearsed and committed performance of this concerto with the same forces. Perhaps this is why, at times, in order to make her personal emphases heard, they came across something like the equivalent of a yellow marker in a used textbook. A pity. She’s better than that.
Kern’s encore was Rachmaninoff’s arrangement of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee.” Like Daniil Trivonov in a recent concert, she took her encore at such a blistering speed that it was over almost before it started. T’was a bagatelle, to be sure, and her technical prowess was never more in evidence than when she ended the encore demurely with a musical “wink,” pleasing the audience no end. Many brava!s were heard over the next several minutes.
For reasons unknown to this reviewer, the Tchaikovsky symphony was omitted from the matinee program, so I cannot say how Slatkin fares in Tchaikovsky, a composer he has rarely recorded — or, for that matter, whether the orchestra had time to rehearse the Tchaikovsky. Slatkin will always be one of the essential American conductors, but unprepared performances like the Rachmaninoff are not likely to burnish his legacy. Fortunately for the music lovers in the audience, North Carolina Symphony concerts under music director Carlos Miguel Prieto are, in this reviewer’s experience, impeccably prepared. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- North Carolina Symphony: ncsymphony.org
- Leonard Slatkin: leonardslatkin.com
- Olga Kern: olgakern.com
- Cindy McTe: cindymctee.com

Read more by Christopher Hill.
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